Carnival of the Africans #10

The 10th edition of the Carnival of the Africans is out at Owen Swart's 01 and the Universe. My picks... The Skeptic Detective on the bullshit around organic food, other things amanzi with a depressing anecdote about muti, and The Skeptic Blacksheep on woo products for health.

The Skeptic Detective will host the next carnival on September 28th...

African science blogrolling for August

The updated African science and skepticism blogroll for August... Well, I say "updated" but there are no actual updates. As far as I know, there are no new blogs to add. If you know of any, please email me!

• 01 and the universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus
• Amanuensis
  
• Ambient Normality
• Bullshit Fatigue
  
• Botswana Skeptic
  
• Effortless Incitement
• Ewan’s Corner
• Ionian Enchantment
• Irreverence
• Limbic Nutrition
  
• Orion Spur
  
• Other Things Amanzi
• Pickled Bushman
• Prometheus Unbound
• Psychohistorian
  
• Reason Check
  
• Scorched
• Shadows Hide
  
• Stop Danie Krügel
  
• Subtle Shift in Emphasis
• The Science Of Sport
• The Skeptic Black Sheep
• The Skeptic Detective

Lazy Linking

Some more lazy linking...

The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna – Southern Friend Science

• Dolphin safe tuna, it turns out, is really bad for the environment. For every dolphin saved, 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks, and almost 1,200 small fish die needlessly. And dolphins aren't even endangered.

"Creationists, now they’re coming for your children" and "The truth dogs reveal about evolution" – The Times

• Extracts from Richard Dawkins' upcoming book, The Greatest Show on Earth.

CSI Myths: The Shaky Science Behind Forensics – Popular Mechanics

• A piece arguing forensics is actually not particularly scientific. Rather scary. C.f. Gladwell's article on how criminal profiling is pseudoscience. Two quotes:
• "The scientific method is instrumental to our understanding of the physical world. To scientists, the process is sacrosanct: Research your topic, generate a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, analyze your data and then publish the results for peer review. Forensic science, however, was not developed by scientists. It was created by cops—often guided by little more than common sense—looking for reliable ways to match patterns from clues with evidence tied to suspects."
• "Fingerprints are believed to be unique, but the process of matching prints has no statistically valid model... [but as] Jennifer Mnookin has written, “fingerprint examiners typically testify in the language of absolute certainty.”" (Via Skepchick)

6 Bullshit Facts About Psychology That Everybody Believes – Cracked

• Pretty good (and certainly funny). However, the author overstates the case a number of times, especially on #4 & #3. Obviously, you shouldn't rely on Cracked for scientific information, so take with a pinch or two of salt.

How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer – Study Hacks

• Good advice on how to get writing done, based on interviews with several professional non-fiction authors. (Via Michael Nielsen).

Spoon Bending for beginners: Anomalistic Psychology in schools – The Guardian

• Chris French on why it's a good idea to teach anomalistic psychology (which is like parapsychology minus the credulity) to teenagers.

Holding heavy objects makes us see things as more important – Not Exactly Rocket Science

• The glories of the human mind! Among other things, people holding heavier clipboards think foreign (read: non-American) currencies are worth more than do control subjects with lighter clipboards.

See my Google Reader Shared Items RSS for more...

Globalizing Science Publishing

Wieland Gevers, Emeritus Professor of Medical Biochemistry at UCT, has an interesting editorial (gated, I think) in this week's Science about how to make scientific publishing truly global by including the developing world. An excerpt:

Publishing in scientific journals is the most common and powerful means to disseminate new research findings. Visibility and credibility in the scientific world require publishing in journals that are included in global indexing databases such as those of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Most scientists in developing countries remain at the periphery of this critical communication process, exacerbating the low international recognition and impact of their accomplishments. For science to become maximally influential and productive across the globe, this needs to change.

...

How can the global reach and potential impact of scientific research in Africa and other developing countries be optimized? Of primary importance is boosting the quality and quantity of work that is locally published, through measures including review of submissions by peers from within and outside the country, skilled editing, and exploitation of local niches and special research opportunities. A proliferation of journals, short-lived publications, print-only journals, and poor distribution constitutes a picture that must change. A nationally organized project can probably make the biggest difference, with investment by government and research-support agencies, as well as wide participation by local and regional scientific communities.

Religious atheists

So I was thinking again today about a post of mine from a while ago, "Atheists who believe in God". The short version: a Pew religious survey found, incredibly, that 55% of agnostics and 21% of atheists say they believe in God or a "universal spirit". In my previous post I did joke that "in other news: 1 in 4 vegans eat meat" and so on, but I didn't quite spell out how preposterous this actually is.

An atheist, basically, is someone who lacks a belief in (any) God. So the very definition of an atheist is someone who does not believe. A theistic atheist, in other words, is a necessarily non-existent being; such a thing simply cannot exist in any possible universe. The same is true of, for example, a married bachelor. The definition of bachelor is "unmarried man", so a person cannot possibly be both a bachelor and married. The same goes for two-horned unicorns, three-sided squares, non-black black ravens and absolutely certain agnostics.

A person who self-identifies as atheist but also claims to believe in God, then, is either dumb, deeply confused or doesn't know what 'atheist' means. What certainly isn't true is that this person is actually both an atheist and a theist. (Well, at least not at the same time).

Encephalon #74

The 74th edition of Encephalon is out at Neuronarritive. Posts to check out: The Neurocritic on a new clitoral homunculus, Brain Stimulant on the brain and free will (though not in the strict philosophical sense), and Neurospeculation on hand clapping as a test for hemispatial neglect.

I'll be hosting the next edition on September 14th...

Carnival of the Africans, call for submissions

So it's almost time for the Carnival of the Africans again. Owen at 01 and the universe will host this month's edition, as usual on the 28th. Please check out his call for submissions, the guidelines for the carnival, and then email Owen your posts at: owen(dot)swart{at}gmail(dot)com...

Fun with sex

One important factor that drove the evolution of psychological sexual dimorphism is the difference in the minimum obligatory parental investment between the sexes. (This is the great insight of Trivers, 1972). Men, as the rather coarse saying has it, ‘can leave a bed unmade’. That is, a man need only invest a few minutes of effort and some sperm to produce a child. Women, on the contrary, must invest as much as men plus 9 months of pregnancy and, given the absence of baby formula on the African savannah, several months or years of breast-feeding. Moreover, before the advent of modern medicine, childbirth was very dangerous so a woman quite literally risked her life to have children. The minimum obligatory investment for men and women, then, is radically different, so we should expect the evolution of a dimorphic sexual psychology reflecting, as Trivers put it, 'female choice and male competition'. (This is, obviously, a crude simplification). And, not surprisingly, we have a mountain of empirical evidence that confirms this expectation.

There is a lot one can say about this theory, and the above sketch certainly does not do it justice or acknowledge the complexities and uncertainties of the empirical data. But a story I saw in a newspaper recently made me think of one of its features, namely, that a man could always be doing better. From the perspective of a man’s genes, women are an extremely valuable and limiting resource. This may seem a bit weird, so let me explain. There are (of course) a finite number of fertile women alive at any given time, and, since a man has such a low minimum parental investment, he could, in principle, impregnate tens of thousands of them. Women, on the other hand, have to carry and give birth to all their offspring, so the total number of children each woman could have in a lifetime is severely limited by comparison. Men have the potential to sire several orders of magnitude more offspring than women, and as a result there is an oversupply of willing males. (One interesting consequence is that there is a much greater variance in male reproductive success, which produces much greater variance in males in a whole range of traits. The variance in male mathematics grades, for example, is substantially higher than that of women).

In any case, the story that got me thinking about this again concerns one Desmond Hatchett (pictured above). Hatchett, an American man from Tennessee, is only 29 years old but, amazingly, has fathered 20 children. Not quite Ismial the Bloodthirsty (who reportedly sired at least 888 children) or Genghis Khan (who is the likely ancestor [pdf] of ~8% of Central Asian men, and ~0.5% of all men worldwide), but evolutionary speaking, not bad at all.

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Trivers, R. (1972) "Parental investment and sexual selection" in Campbell, B. (ed.), Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man.