Video: Beware the Believers

The Expelled brouhaha is a gift that just keeps on giving: the latest is a glorious video satirising the movie's thesis that creationist academics are being systematically discriminated against. (Some people think the video is actually a viral ad for Expelled or an anti-atheist piece. This, however, doesn't seem to be the case - surely a clever atheist made the video. If not, the creationist crowd are enormously inept and even more comically stupid than I thought).

Anyway, the video features Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Eugenie Scott, Charles Darwin, and PZ Myers rapping... As a friend is wont to say: truly we live in a golden age. (The video is embedded below, click here to go directly to YouTube).

Skeptics' Circle #83

The 83rd edition of the Skeptics' Circle is out at Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant. He does a very good job, so check it out. My contribution to this edition is "Five Oft Repeated Medical Myths". Other entries to check out: Aardvarchaeology on a case of sibling incest in Germany; Skeptico explaining (AGAIN) that Darwinism is not responsible for Nazism; and Bug Girl's Blog on a (possibly real) pubic lice fad (no, really).

Friday fun: xkcd again

xkcd is deservidly one of the most popular web comics and Friday fun wouldn't be the same without it. There have been some classic xkcd's, like this one:

Geckos rock

So I was lying on my bed the other day when I noticed a gecko hunting around the light on the roof of my bedroom. As I'm used to geckos running around everywhere, usually I don't pay too much attention, but that day I did. I watched this particular gecko hunt (unsuccessfully as it turned out) and was amazed to discover how much it used its tail to maneuver. Specifically, it coiled up its tail and used it as a kind of spring to launch it towards its query. Pretty cool stuff, I thought, and another example of evolution's ingenuity.

Today, I was pleasantly surprised to come across a new study in PNAS on geckos and their tails. The abstract:

Geckos are nature's elite climbers. Their remarkable climbing feats have been attributed to specialized feet with hairy toes that uncurl and peel in milliseconds. Here, we report that the secret to the gecko's arboreal acrobatics includes an active tail. We examine the tail's role during rapid climbing, aerial descent, and gliding. We show that a gecko's tail functions as an emergency fifth leg to prevent falling during rapid climbing. A response initiated by slipping causes the tail tip to push against the vertical surface, thereby preventing pitch-back of the head and upper body. When pitch-back cannot be prevented, geckos avoid falling by placing their tail in a posture similar to a bicycle's kickstand. Should a gecko fall with its back to the ground, a swing of its tail induces the most rapid, zero-angular momentum air-righting response yet measured. Once righted to a sprawled gliding posture, circular tail movements control yaw and pitch as the gecko descends. Our results suggest that large, active tails can function as effective control appendages. These results have provided biological inspiration for the design of an active tail on a climbing robot, and we anticipate their use in small, unmanned gliding vehicles and multisegment spacecraft.

The Economist on the science of religion

The always fabulous Economist has a very good article on the scientific examination of religion this week. The article focuses on the (ingeniously-entitled) Explaining Religion project (pdf) that is being funded by the European Union. As The Economist explains:

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

Friday fun: Penn & Teller reveal the saw trick

The magic duo Penn & Teller are terrific performers and first-rate skeptics (their show Bullshit debunks nonsense regularly). This week's Friday fun is a great act wherein Penn & Teller reveal how the famous (but now cheesy) saw trick is done. (The video is embedded below, here is the direct link to Metacafe). Obviously, if you don't want to know how the trick is done, don't watch the video...


Penn & Teller: Saw Trick Revealed! - The funniest home videos are here

The Paleolitihic diet

One of the things I love about Wikipedia is the large number of good articles on strange or obscure topics. Today's featured article (i.e. a very high quality article placed on Wikipedia's main page) is a perfect example: Paleolithic-style diet. So we all know the standard evolutionary psychology view that human beings are adapted to the Pleistocene, not to modernity. As a result, our taste for sugary, fatty and salty foods is maladaptive when supermarkets and fast food restaurants abound. The Paleolithic diet (aka paleo diet, caveman diet, Stone Age diet or hunter-gatherer diet) starts from a very similar view and advocates a diet consisting of:

wild plants and animals that humans and their close relatives habitually consumed during the Paleolithic (the Old Stone Age), a period of about 2 million years duration that ended about 10,000 years ago when Homo sapiens developed agriculture... Building upon the principles of evolutionary medicine, this nutritional concept is based on the premise that modern humans are genetically adapted to the diet of their Paleolithic ancestors and that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture, and therefore that an ideal diet for human health and well-being is one that resembles this ancestral diet. Proponents of Paleolithic-style diets differ in their dietary prescriptions, but all agree that people today should eat mainly meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots and nuts, and avoid grains, legumes, dairy products, salt and refined sugar.

AIDS Denialism in South Africa

Nicolli Natrass, an economist at the University of Cape Town (who, for the record, taught me a fantastic course on the economic problems of Africa), had a great article about AIDS denialism in Skeptical Inquirer last year. The article, "Aids Denialism vs. Science", documents in detail how dangerous unscientific thinking can be - in this case, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people were harmed. Concludes Natrass:

People in positions of authority, be they statesmen like Mbeki or parents like Maggiore, hold the lives of others in their hands. For them to reject science in favor of AIDS denialism is not only profoundly irresponsible but also tragic. But responsibility for unnecessary suffering and death rests also with the AIDS denialists who promote discredited and dangerous views and encourage people to reject scientifically tested treatments.

Kanazawa smackdown

Satoshi Kanazawa is not exactly being welcomed in the science bloggging community. I led the way with a rapid response to his irresponsible call for nuclear genocide, then Cosma Shalizi had a go (as I mentioned yesterday) and now PZ Myers - author of the world's most widely read science blog - roasts Kanazawa as well. I'm sure there will be much more to come...

Homo floresiensis update II

See also my earlier pieces: "The floresiensis mess" and "Homo floresiensis update".

Yet more about whether the Flores specimens discovered in 2004 constitute a new species, this time on the positive side. In an upcoming article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleoanthropologists Adam Gordon, Lisa Nevell, and Bernard Wood of George Washington University argue a statistical analysis of one of the skulls (LB1) reveals the Flores specimens cannot be shrunken Homo sapiens. Intriguingly, they say the skull most closely resembles Homo habilis, a very primitive hominid indeed. Says Gordon: "This is particularly exciting because ... it suggests that we really do have a hominin lineage that split off from our own as much as 1.7 million years ago, yet persisted up until the time when modern humans started peopling the Americas. That's pretty cool."

When the study goes online, I'll update this entry with a link to it.

Update: the article can be found here.

Encephalon 41

Encephalon #41 is out at Pure Pedantry. Entries to check out: The Phineas Gage Fan Club on domain-specificity in the visual system; Advances in the History of Psychology on how the term 'industrial psychology' may have been the result of a typo; and Neuroanthropology on dissociation strategies for peak performance.

Kanazawa gets the Cosma treatment

Cosma Shalizi, polymath author of the Three-Toed Sloth blog and keeper of innumerable useful Notebooks, has also responded to Satoshi Kanazawa's crazy call for nuclear genocide. Shalizi concludes Kanazawa is:

the Fenimore Cooper of sociobiology, a man who has leveraged an inability to do data analysis or understand psychometrics into an official blog at Psychology Today, where he gets to advocate genocidal nuclear war as revenge for 9/11. He seems to mean it, rather than be fukayaming.

I plan never to get on Cosma's bad side...

Templeton 2008

The Templeton Prize ("For Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities") purports to be a science prize but it is nothing of the sort. The stated aim of the Templeton Foundation is to reconcile science and religion, it entirely discounts the possibility that there are serious tensions between scientific and religious views of the world. (There are also direct contradictions when religious texts are interpreted stirctly instead of metaphorically, exactly what the vast majority of religious people do). The Templeton Prize, in my (and Dawkins') view, distorts science and comes close to being a bribe for scientists to say nice things about religion.

It also thrusts manifest silliness into the public spotlight. The winner of the 2008 Templeton Prize is one Michael Heller, who has some seriously daft ideas. His musings about evolution and intelligent design are particularly annoying.

See also: Controversies at the Templeton Foundation Wikipedia article.

Video: Jill Bolte Taylor at TED

Jill Bolte Taylor, an Indiana University School of Medicine neuroanatomist, gave a fascinating talk at TED in February. (The video is embedded below, here is the direct link). While I certainly think the video is worth watching (otherwise I wouldn't feature it here), I have a couple of serious reservations. It's clear from the video that Taylor's experience was an intensely emotional one and, let's be frank, science and intense emotions don't go so well together. It certainly made me worry when she started going on about "nirvana", it annoyed me that she dramatically oversimplified the very nuanced, complicated and still emerging picture of hemispherical specialization in the brain, and it frustrated me generally that she seems to let her emotions get in the way of her science. (To be clear: emotions are important and I have no problem with them being expressed, even at TED. But we should try our best not to let our emotions influence our intellectual positions - that's what I'm criticizing Taylor for, not the sheer fact of being emotional).



See also: Wired's article on Taylor's TEDTalk.

Friday fun: A 'Scientific' Guide to Flirting

As I've said before, I am completely convinced some clever publisher will stumble upon the findings of evolutionary psychology and commission a self-help book based on its findings. It's bound to happen, if it hasn't already. In fact, there is a "scientific" self-help guide (based in part of evolutionary psychological findings) available online already: the Social Issues Research Centre's "SIRC Guide to Flirting". Combining common-sense and research findings, the guide offers amusing and (it seems to me) perfectly reasonable flirting advice.

Anyway, don't take it too seriously, this is "Friday fun" after all. (In other words, I disclaim all responsibility: if you follow the advice and it backfires, don't send me an angry email!)

Homo floresiensis update

The other day I blogged about the continuing debate over Homo floresiensis, the possible species of Homo. I mentioned two recent papers that challenge the proposition that the Flores specimens constitute a new species: Obendorf et. al.'s suggestion that the specimens are Homo sapiens who suffered from cretinism and Berger et. al.'s report on a new find of small-bodied remains on Palau that suggests the Flores specimens might have been Homo sapiens who exhibited physiological dwarfism. The anthropoligist John Hawks has now examined the Berger paper (which he peer-reviewed for PLoS One) and written a detailed blog entry on it. I can, by the way, highly recommend Hawks, he certainly knows what he's talking about.

See also: SciAm Observations Blog's piece on Berger et. al.'s paper and National Geographic's article.

Skeptics' Circle #82

The 82nd edition of the Skeptics' circle is being very ably hosted by Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes. My contribution to the circle is my review of Francis Wheen's How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. Other posts to check out: PodBlack Cat's fantastic entry on superstition, Greta Christina's thoughtful entry on theism and morality, The Bad Idea Blog's piece on the revival of exorcism in Europe, and Archaeoporn's critical analysis of the claim that Moses was on drugs.

Video: Craig Venter and Artificial Life

Craig Venter is a scientific maven and maverick who leads a team that is on the verge of creating artificial life that, among other things, might produce artificial organisms capable of replacing the entire petro-chemical industry. This is Important Stuff.

Venter's 2008 TEDTalk is embedded below, or here is the direct link.

Jobs for academic types

Benoit Hardy-Vallee, author of the fantastic blog Natural Rationality, has a great little post on what to do with a Ph.D outside academia. He even has a whole section of links to resources for philosophers on finding non-academic jobs! Who would have guessed it? Philosophers in demand!

An Oniony Shroud of Turin

I'm on record saying The Onion's satire sometimes cuts through bumpkin better than serious analysis can. It has just happened again: "Shroud Of Turin Accidentally Washed With Red Shirt". With all due respect to Joe Nickell, The Onion dealt with this shroud nonsense far quicker and in a far more entertaining way that he ever did. (Okay, so Joe's been far more thorough).

Prostitution

Unsurprisingly, a debate about prostitution has erupted in the US after it emerged New York governor Elliot Spitzer had sex with several prostitutes. Melissa Farley and Victor Malarek argue in a piece in the NYT that the notion that prostitution is a victimless crime is a myth: "Whether the woman is in a hotel room or on a side street in someone’s car, whether she’s trafficked from New York to Washington or from Mexico to Florida or from the city to the suburbs, the experience of being prostituted causes her immense psychological and physical harm. And it all starts with the buyer." This, to put it mildly, is not an argument I buy - I have long thought prostitution ought to be legal, only coercive (and child) sex-work ought to be combated. What consenting adults get up to behind closed doors (whether it involves money or not) is nobody's business. Luckily, this is a topic the wonderful Greta Christina has taken on, so don't take my word for it.

An academic debate has also ensued: why would Spitzer risk his career for 10 minutes of pleasure? Over at Psychology Today's blog collective a vibrant discussion is taking place (especially in the comments). Kramer reposted an article he had written in 1998 to explain why Clinton had risked it all, and then Kanazawa responded with an evolutionary psychological view.

Audio: Rebecca Watson on women in skepticism

Rebecca Watson, prominent “skepchick” and panel member on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, gave a talk recently for the New York City Skeptics on women in the skeptical movement. She did a bunch of research and concluded, contrary to her initial beliefs and rather depressingly, that the average woman seems to be significantly less skeptical than the average man. Based on evidence she collected from a poll of her readers, Watson then goes on to suggest various ways in which to encourage more female participation in the skeptical community.

This is interesting and important stuff. (And Rebecca is always a blast). Give it a listen…

Five Oft Repeated Medical Myths

Note: I'm writing outside my field. Reader beware. (Oh, and please correct my mistakes).

I have no training whatsoever in medicine and, honestly, my approach has always been to outsource my opinions to the experts. If an MD told me I had disease X, I was happy to accept that I had disease X. As a result, until I got involved in the skeptical movement, I knew next to nothing about quackery: while I never took woo claims seriously and went to proper medical doctors, I couldn't tell you why, say, chiropractic was nonsense. A second consequence of relying on experts was that I never paid much attention to what average people said about medicine ("folk medicine"), I didn't much care and didn't trust such people to know what they were talking about. Now that I've been paying attention to medical questions more - actually listening when people talk, reading some medical blogs, looking stuff up occasionally, etc. - I've come to realize just how much utter nonsense circulates even among intelligent people. I have heard smart friends and acquaintances confidently repeat all five the medical myths listed below and I only subsequently found out they were in fact contradicted by science. One learns.

Myth 1: MSG is bad for you. I've heard this one more times than I can remember from numerous intelligent people. I only discovered this is a myth the other day when the New York Times ran an article on it. Subsequently, I found an FDA review of the evidence, which concluded that, for the vast majority of people, eating a normal dose of MSG has no established clinical effect. A quick PubMed search confirmed there doesn't seem to be negative clinical effects associated with this food additive.

Myth 2: you should drink 8 glasses of water. Everyone I've ever met who has been on a diet knows about - and believes - this one. And yet Heinz Valtin conducted a review of the relevant scientific literature and concluded that: "Not only is there no scientific evidence that we need to drink that much [water], but the recommendation could be harmful, both in precipitating potentially dangerous hyponatremia and exposure to pollutants and also in making many people feel guilty for not drinking enough."

Myth 3: sweetner causes cancer. Again, several people have repeated this myth in my presence (including people who I respect a lot) because I use sweetner regularly. There is certainly no way I'm going to be able to shoot this idea down better than Steven Novella, so check out his blog entry that argues sweetner - or at least aspartame - has no demonstrated negative clinical effect.

Myth 4: depression is caused by a "chemical imbalance" or a serotonin lesion. This claim is ubiquitous - whenever depression comes up in conversation, someone is bound to hold forth on "chemical imbalances in the brain". In fact, the cause of depression is currently unknown. Despite this, as Jeffrey Lacasse and Jonathan Leo have demonstrated in two studies (pdf), pharmaceutical companies perpetuate the myth in their advertisements and the media parrots them uncritically.

Myth 5: drinking megadoses of vitamin C cures illness. At least one person who reads this blog (you know who you are!) has tried to convince me this is true. It's not. The idea seems to have originated with Linus Pauling, the great American chemist and (double) Nobel Laurette. Unfortunately, as the always reliable Quackwatch documents in detail, later in his life Pauling branched out into medicine and promptly went off the rails. There is simply no reliable evidence that large doses of vitamins cures either the common cold or cancer.

Book Review: How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

I expected to like, enjoy and agree with Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (retitled Idiot Proof for the American market). I really did. Unfortunately, however, while I certainly agree with a broad array of his conclusions, Wheen significantly undermines the value of his book by turning it into a catalog of things he disagrees with, which only partially overlaps with scientific consensus. Specifically, Wheen arrogantly treats debatable political questions as if they were skeptical issues, that is, he condemns Francis Fukuyama in the same terms as Deepak Chopra, equates supply-side economics and homeopathy, thinks Margaret Thatcher no better than a quack, treats Samuel Huntington no better than a postmodernist and so on. This, I will argue below, is dubious at best and is hubristic in the extreme. Before we get to my criticisms, however, some praise is due and Wheen’s argument needs sketching.

Wheen is a big fan of the Enlightenment; a devotee of Kant, Voltaire, Jefferson, Diderot, Hume, d’Alembert, and their ilk. (Hooray to that!). These thinkers, contend Wheen, may have been diverse but they all shared a characteristic ethos: “a presumption that certain truths about mankind, society and the natural world could be perceived… and that the discovery of these truths would transform the quality of life” (2004: 3). What is more, these thinkers ‘insisted on intellectual autonomy, rejected tradition and authority as infallible sources of truth, loathed bigotry and persecution, were committed to free inquiry and believed knowledge is indeed power’ (p. 5-6). The Enlightenment’s legacy, Wheen goes on to argue, was enormous: it resulted in “the waning of absolutism and superstition, the rise of secular democracy, the understanding of the natural world, the transformation of historical and scientific study, the new political resonance of notions such as ‘progress,’ ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’” (p. 6). Assuming these achievements are desiderata (as seems reasonable), it would certainly be undesirable were the Enlightenment values forgotten – indeed, the purpose of the book, Wheen says, “is to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed, and why it matters” (p. 8). And it matters because "[t]he sleep of reason brings forth monsters, and the past two decades have produced monsters galore… the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum and the assault on reason are a menace to civilisation" (ibid.: 7). The villains in Wheen's piece include "holy warriors, anti-scientific relativists, economic fundamentalists, radical post-modernists, New Age mystics or latter day Chicken Lickens" (ibid.: 311-312).

Mumbo-Jumbo is explicitly modeled on Charles Mackay's classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and succeeds admirably in some respects, particularly when he turns to manias such as the dotcom bubble. The book as a whole is well written, clear, decently researched, funny in places and right on target with quite a few issues. Indeed, if only Wheen had steered clear of political questions and social science problems, his book would have been very good. His attack on the business self-help movement (Ch. 2) is sound, his chapter on post-modernism (Ch. 4) is superb (the best part of the book I’d say), his skewering of doomsday nuts, UFO-believers and quacks (Ch. 5) is admirable, and even his rant against breaches of the wall of separation between church and state (Ch. 6) is good. In fact, I would recommend the book – with some reservations – if it consisted only of the just-mentioned chapters and the introduction. Wheen, however, overlooked this felicitous possibility.

As I mentioned above, despite his book’s several merits, Wheen significantly undermines its value by arrogantly consigning every political ideology and every interpretation of social phenomena but his own to the same category as the genuine pseudosciences. While it is appropriate to condemn, perhaps even ridicule, positions that are anti-science, that fly in the face of scientific consensus (e.g. creationism, psi) or that are manifestly silly (e.g. cerealogy), it is not cricket to do so on issues about which reasonable people can disagree. When there is no scientific consensus (or any other kind of consensus) on some issue, that is, when intelligent, thoughtful people occupy a large range of different positions, it is plainly hubristic to condemn, or ridicule or accuse one’s opponents of obscurantism and irrationality. Fallibilism, we should remember, is an important virtue for any thinker: certainty (about empirical questions) is epistemologically unsound and confidence is appropriate only when there is consensus among the relevant experts. Having a strong opinion on a currently controversial question is perfectly acceptable, of course, but you should understand the arguments in the debate and realize that you could be wrong. That is, it is perfectly acceptable to take sides in current debates if (a) you know the relevant literature and have (what you think are) good reasons to prefer one side and (b) you don’t pretend to be infallible. It is patently ridiculous, though, to be certain when (a) there is nothing remotely resembling consensus and (b) you don’t even provide solid reasons for your own position. Wheen, I submit, is so arrogant he appears to be certain his and only his narrow set of political opinions (basically, unreformed Keynesian Labour with a dose of muscular foreign policy focused on opposing Islamic fundamentalism) is the only reasonable position and is in no need of real, systematic defense.

Take, for example, Wheen’s treatment of Margaret Thatcher: he begins the book by comparing her to Ayatollah Khomeini, and then goes on to pan her economic policies (and monetarism and supply-side economics generally) as ‘Voodoo economics’, accuse her of supporting terrorism, being a crazy religionist, and much else. Indeed, he has nothing whatsoever positive to say about her. (Nor, I note, any other politician save Ralph Nader. Not even Clinton or Gore is spared: Wheen calls Gore an “expensive mountebank” [p. 106] and says Clinton is “a sexual predator and alleged rapist [and] a man of no discernible moral scruples” [p. 198]). Now, while no one should think Thatcher was perfect or an unmitigated blessing, as The Economist notes in its review of Mumbo Jumbo, reasonable people – some of them experts – credit Thatcher with turning the British economy around. Let’s not forget that, for all of the post-war period before Thatcher’s rule, Britain was ‘the sick man of Europe’: other European countries consistently outgrew it, to the extent that its GDP per capita rank position began to drop. One of the primary reasons for this economic lethargy, many others and I think, was a radical, highly organized and irresponsible special interest group: the labor unions. (For background, see Olson, 1982). During her first and second terms, Thatcher won a bitter and protracted battle to reform the labor market. This, together with a series of other important economic reforms, is widely credited with injecting dynamism into the economy, resulting in a long period of fast, sustained economic growth. You may or you may not agree with this analysis, and I won’t here try to convince you, I’m only highlighting the fact that there is a reasonable argument to be made, endorsed by many clever people and some experts, that Thatcher’s rule, for all its faults, had some positive effects. Once we acknowledge reasonable, intelligent people think, for reasons that aren’t crazy, that at least some of Thatcher’s economic policies were beneficial, Wheen is utterly exposed. It is simply untenable to equate ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Reaganomics’ (supply-side economics, monetarism and so on) with homeopathy, Iranian fundamentalism, or the irrational exuberance of the dot-com era. And do so without real argument! Frankly, this sort of uninformed arrogance doesn’t merely annoy me, it outrages me. (I am not saying, of course, that supply-side economics hasn’t been taken too far, or stretched too thin, I’m saying it’s not pseudoscience or anything close to it. If Wheen actually knew something about, say, the Laffer-curve, he’d know it’s more than “discredited superstition” [p. 18], there is a lot of research behind it. Politicians have indeed misused it, as is their wont, but that doesn’t invalidate the notion.)

I said above that, had Wheen restricted himself to genuine pseudoscience (quackery, self-help and so on) I would have recommended his book, but with a few reservations. And the reason I would have reservations even then is that Wheen regularly makes small but annoying factual mistakes, worryingly often commits logical errors (erecting straw men and making ad hominem attacks being most common), sometimes employs very weak arguments, occasionally descends to ugly pettiness and plays hard and fast with evidence on a number of occasions. I won’t try to substantiate all these charges, I’ll simply illustrate a few of them.

Firstly, an example of childish pettiness: in the midst of a discussion of Tony Blair’s political ideology, known as the “Third Way”, we find the following: “Blair also revealed that the Third Way was ‘vibrant’ and ‘passionate’, rather like Bill Clinton’s libido, but also ‘flexible’ and ‘innovative’, like Clinton’s definition of sexual relations” (p. 227). What? Does Wheen really think it is a good idea to intersperse a purportedly serious discussion of the most important political movement of the 90s with weak jokes about Clinton’s sex life? Secondly, a couple of examples of small but annoying factual errors: Wheen thinks Dwight D. Eisenhower was a four star general (p. 172) when he wore five, thinks the “linguistic turn” was a postmodern phenomenon (p. 85) when it was a mainstream philosophical development, and believes Francis Fukuyama is a historian (p. 70) when he’s a political scientist. While these mistakes are of course innocuous individually, cumulatively they undermine one’s hope that Wheen cares about evidence and checks his facts. Thirdly, an example of Wheen playing hard and fast with evidence: “By then, Thatcher’s application of Friedmanite principles – restricting the money supply, cutting public spending – was indeed producing results. During her first year inflation surged from 9 per cent to more than 20 per cent; interest rates and unemployment both rose sharply” (p. 18-19). While inflation did double in the first fourteen months of Thatcher’s first term, it is utterly disingenuous to attribute it to her policies. Thatcher took office in May 1979, after the Iranian Revolution (which culminated in February 1979) set off the Second Oil Crisis, during which the crude oil price more than doubled. Now, either Wheen knows this and he’s deliberately withholding information from his readers to score points (which is bad) or he doesn’t know and is thus ignorant of basic international history (which is worse).

I could carry on multiplying examples of Wheen’s errors or defend Fukuyama, Paul Kennedy, Samuel Huntington, Thomas Friedman and others from the charge that they’re comparable to charlatans like Deepak Chopra, and so on. But I don’t want to try my readers’ patience. I think the take-home message is clear at this point: maybe a third of the book is decent, the rest is poor to appalling. Rather don’t read this book, you have better things to do.

References

Olson, M. (1982) The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Wheen, F. (2004) How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (London: Harper Perennial)

(Other reviews: Complete Review, Guardian(a), Guardian(b), Telegraph, and Washington Post).

The floresiensis mess

The debate over the status of Homo floresiensis, the possible species of Homo that survived until about 12,000 years ago that was discovered in 2003 on the Indonesian island of Flores, just won't go away. Two separate much-publicized studies that challenge the notion that floresiensisis is a distinct species emerged this week. First, Peter Obendorf, Charles Oxnard, and Ben Kefford argued in their study in Proc. Roy. Soc. B that the purported floresiensis skeletons were actually Homo sapiens who suffered from congenital hypothyroidism, or cretinism. The anthropologist John Hawks, for one, disagreed with this finding on his blog, arguing Obendorf et. al. got it badly wrong.

More recently, University of Witwatersrand paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and colleagues describe a new set of small-bodied human skeletons that were found in Palau, Micronesia. Berger et. al. conclude that their specimens are Homo sapiens who exhibit physiological dwarfism that regularly emerges in island contexts. They also suggest that the characteristics of the Flores specimens "may be best explained as correlates of small body size in an island adaptation, regardless of taxonomic affinity. Under any circumstances the Palauan sample supports at least the possibility that the Flores hominins are simply an island adapted population of H. sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities."

The New Darwinism in the Humanities

Something a bit more positive about the humanities...

A couple of years ago Harold Fromm, an English studies professor at the University of Arizona, published the best short study of the application of evolutionary psychology to the humanities I have ever come across. The article, published in the Hudson Review, was "The New Darwinism in the Humanities" and came in two parts: "Part I: From Plato to Pinker" (pdf) and "Part II: Back to Nature, Again" (pdf). As I have mentioned before, while I have don't know the literature well enough to sides in internal debates, a scientific approach (with suitable Darwinian infusions) is exactly what I think the humanities needs. A flourishing, successful, scientifically orientated research program may finally loosen the grip of fashionable nonsense such as postmodernism and start bringing the "two cultures" closer together. Done right, such an approach may fetter theorizing in the humanities to the real world, preventing it from drifting randomly.

In any case, Fromm's article is an excellent guide to an emerging field. Give it a try.

Video: The first video from TED 2008

Microsoft Research is doing some really cool stuff recently. One of their most inspiring projects is WorldWide Telescope, an interactive software package which lets people explore the universe through a seamless integration of the best astronomy pictures. Encouragingly, the software will be downloadable free of charge. (The video is embedded below, here is the direct link TED).

A random, speculative hypothesis regarding the humanities

The requirement of regular accurate feedback for the development of expertize that I mentioned in my previous post made me think (read: speculate wildly)...

Maybe the manifest uselessness of some of those in the humanities can be explained by the fact that they never, or rarely, get suitable feedback. When a surgeon makes a (serious) mistake, a patient dies. When a civil engineer fouls up a calculation, a bridge comes tumbling down. When a vulcanologist prophecies falsely, the volcano shows her up. When a physicist hypothesizes wrongly, the experimental data exposes it. In contrast, an English professor (say), gets no feedback whatsoever from his materials, his subject matter - only from colleagues. And colleagues - unlike erupting volcanoes or a dead patient - can be argued with, dismissed or (seemingly reasonably) rationalized away. As a result, thinking in the humanities can become totally untethered - free to drift capriciously like fads or fashions. The result? Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luca Luce Irigaray...

Anyway, don't take this too seriously.

Lazy linking: Some popular pieces

There has been a flood of really interesting popular articles relevant to this blog in the last couple of weeks. Here are a few of them...

Pride of place must go to Dr. Mark Colvin's short, sharp critique of homeopathy. Colvin argues convincingly that South Africa (and Africa generally) should only use medicine that has been shown to be effective. He concludes: "Internationally there is a growing recognition that approaches that claim to have beneficial health effects must be substantiated scientifically. Maybe we should follow suit and seriously review the contribution that homeopathy and other forms of complementary medicine have, or do not have, towards improving human health."

Scientific American's fantastic psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science blog Mind Matters published a good piece on embodied cognition. The author, Art Glenberg, begins by attacking the "mind as computer" analogy, summarizes some recent research and then speculates about the possibility of using the findings of embodied cognition research to help improve pedagogy. While I'm somewhat skeptical of the more extreme claims made by embodied cognition enthusiasts, Glenberg's article is interesting and worthwhile.

Then there is Jim Holt's genuinely fantastic New Yorker article on "the numbers guy", Stanislas Dehaene. Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Collège de France, is one of the leading lights in the field of numerical cognition, the study of the cognitive and neurological bases of the number sense. The article is long and detailed but definitely worth it.

The Times ran a light-hearted but interesting