Video: Hymn to evolution sung by an innocent child

Genius.


Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

Picture: Sexual Psychology (summarized)

Lazy Linking

"Psychopathy seems to be caused by specific mental deficiencies"

• The Economist reviews research that used the venerable Wason selection task to reveal psychopaths seem unable to understand social contracts. This suggests (albeit weakly) that psychopathy is a frequency-dependent adaptation. 

"Uganda: Debating God in a God-Fearing Country"

• A Time magazine profile of the courageous James Onen, head of Freethought Kampala, an organization dedicated to science and reason in a highly superstitious country.

"The Shadow Scholar"

• Disturbing Chronicle of Higher Education profile of an 'academic mercenary' paid to write essays and other academic work for students. Scary stuff.
• It seems to me that there is little academics themselves can do about this problem. If I suspect a student has paid someone to do her work for her, then what? I... hack her email account? The only long-term solution, it seems to me, is to criminalize the companies that provide these services - after all, they're arguably committing (or at least abetting) fraud. When the companies' records are seized, guilty students should be tracked down and punished. Degrees should be withdrawn, etc. I'm not saying this will solve the problem completely, but it'll at least lessen it, and provide some deterrent. 

"Freaks, Geeks, and Economists"

• The subtitle says it all: "a study confirms every suspicion you ever had about high-school dating".

"Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies"

• Fallacies categorized and their family relationships mapped. Good stuff. 

"This Is Your Brain on Metaphors"

• Robert Sapolsky does great work, and this piece is as good evidence of that as any. He reviews a bunch of research which demonstrates that the brain conflates the literal and metaphorical. That is, certain 'higher' mental functions (like morality) is simply bolted onto 'lower' mental functions (like disgust). 
• "Nelson Mandela was wrong when he advised, “Don’t talk to their minds; talk to their hearts.” He meant talk to their insulas and cingulate cortices and all those other confused brain regions, because that confusion could help make for a better world."

"Tanzania's first elected albino MP fears for life"

• What's the harm? This. This is the harm. 

"South African rhinos pay the price of new cancer myths"

• Quacks + poachers = rhinos in trouble.

"Not so fast... What's so premature about premature ejaculation?"

• Jesse Bering strikes again. Premature ejaculation from an evolutionary perspective... Be sure to read the incisive comments.

"SA's urban myth storyteller strikes again"

• Profile of Arthur Goldstuck, premiere cataloger of South Africa's urban legends. I attended the book launch, and I've read his latest book (The Burglar in the Bin Bag). Very good stuff. 
• Arthur is on Twitter as @art2gee and blogs at Urban Legends.

"What’s In Placebos?"

• Apparently placebos are not all alike. Steven Novella covers the fascinating details and discusses the consequences. 

"Palestinian Blogger Angers West Bank Muslims"

• It's not exactly surprising that an atheist is unwelcome in the West Bank, but (1) it's still lametable that he isn't but (2) heartening that he exists at all. 

"10 Bizarre Medical Discoveries"

• Sample: symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride... 

"Kasparov versus the World"

• The fascinating story of Gary Kasparov's epic game against the rest of the world (well, a huge number of chess players who collaborated online). Kasparov called it "the greatest game in the history of chess".

"The glorious mess of real scientific results"

• This is written by Ben Goldacre. Go, read.

"Calculate the Effect of an Asteroid Impact on Earth"

• Go on, what are you waiting for? You know you want to...

"Putting a Hex on Hitler, 1941"

• Life covers a batty attempt to defeat Hitler... with witchcraft. 

"There Are 5,000 Janitors in the U.S. with PhDs"

• :-(

"Atheism and the Enlightenment: In the name of godlessness"

• Another Economist piece, this time a review of the book A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment. According to the review, the book is the story of the salon presided over by the (unjustly forgotten - but not by me) Baron d'Holbach. 

"The Fascinating Story of the Twins Who Share Brains, Thoughts, and Senses"

• The most interesting conjoined twins since Chang and Eng Bunker. Truly remarkable story.

Pretty / WOW / heh

"'Dance Your Ph.D. 2010' Winner Announced"

• This is just wonderful. Watch the video, srsly.

"National Geographic's Photography Contest 2010"

• Must see gorgeousness from Big Picture.

"Wildlife through the lens"

• Beautiful wildlife photography.

"The Difference Between Jesus and Zombies"

• heh

"What I Think About Atlas Shrugged"

• Sci-fi author John Scalzi rips into Ayn Rand. Hilarity results. 

15 Authors

There is a meme going round Facebook called "15 Authors" in which you list (you guessed it) 15 authors who have "influenced you and that will always stick with you". This is mine...

1. Joseph Heller -- Catch-22 is funniest book ever written - also: it's profound. Pity the fools who don't get it. [You know who you are].
2. Sophocles -- his plays are masterpieces. I've read Oedipus Rex five times, and it still gives me goose-bumps.
3. Dan Dennett -- too many brilliant books to count. Darwin's Dangerous Idea is arguably one of the best non-fiction books of the 90s. His "Postmodernism and Truth" shaped my thinking significantly.
4. Jorge Louis Borges -- author of innumerable mind-bending and beautiful short-stories. If you've not done so yet, listen to "The Library of Babel" (the mp3 is here).
5. John Stuart Mill -- On Liberty is his most important book, but his autobiography and A System of Logic are also very good.
6. Mancur Olson -- An economist actually worth reading. The Logic of Collective Action and Power and Prosperity are both must-reads. (The speculation about the origins of states in P&P is fantastic).
7. Vladimir Nabokov -- I've not read enough of his work, but Lolita is a disturbing, incisive study of obsession. His prose is sublime.
8. Simon Blackburn -- I actually like only one of his books - Think. The latter is the best single-volume introduction to philosophy. I read it at a pivotal time in my intellectual development.
9. Steven Pinker -- possibly the best popularizer of science around. Like Think, I read How the Mind Works at a pivotal time: it was really the start of my interest in science as a whole, and psychology and evolution in particular. The Blank Slate is also excellent.
10. Jared Diamond -- Guns, Germs and Steel is in my opinion THE best non-fiction book of the 90s. Must. Read. The Third Chimpanzee is also worth a read. (But avoid Why is Sex Fun?)
11. Cormac McCarthy -- The Road and Blood Meridian are wonderful both. I've decided to read his entire oeuvre over the next couple of years.
12. Paul Theroux -- his travel writing is something to behold. I'm not a huge fan of his fiction, other than The Mosquito Coast.
13. Richard Dawkins -- He's had a tremendous influence on me. The Selfish Gene first introduced modern theoretical biology to me, and it's had a lasting impact. The God Delusion inspired me to "come out" to my family as an atheist. His best book since The Blind Watchmaker is The Ancestor's Tale, if you haven't read it yet, do so.
14. Malcolm Gladwell -- my favorite science journalist. I've read all three of his books (Outliers is the best, followed by Blink, then The Tipping Point). He's actually on the list for his long-from New Yorker essays. Have a look at his archive.
15. John Rawls -- A Theory of Justice is the locus classicus of 20th century political philosophy. Reading it had an absolutely profound effect on me.

Lazy Linking

"This is a news website article about a scientific finding"

• Martin Robbins' absolutely wonderful parody of bad science reporting. I really can't recommend it enough. 
• Also: read the superb comments (well, some of them at least - there are over 500). 

"An Ode to the Many Evolved Virtues of Human Semen"

• Jesse Bering on the psychological effects of semen (mostly on women). He covers tons of fascinating research, including the finding that semen may have an anti-depressant effect. (Though, as this comment points out, there is a serious confound). 
• Best line: “I’m not a medical doctor, but my testicles are licensed pharmaceutical suppliers”. (Said in jest, by the way). 

"There Is No Such Thing As Sexual Intercourse" 

• Anthropologist Pascal Boyer pwns lefty/po-mo academics. 

"U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey"

• Pew surveys Americans about their knowledge of religion. Shocking ignorance found. (You can take a quiz featuring some of the questions in the survey. FWIW, I got 13 out of 15...)
• Amazingly, only 85% of the respondents knew that an atheist is a person who doesn't believe in God. A finding consistent with the existence of 'atheists' who believe in God. (Yes, that is a contradiction in terms, but there you go).

"I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly"

• I'm not linking to this for the content, but for George Monboit's wonderful demonstration that there is honor in saying "I was wrong". I've never been a fan of Monboit's, but his willingness to write this column certainly sways my opinion more to the positive side. 

"Should science journalists take sides?"

• Yes, says Ed Yong. They should (do their best to) side with truth. 

"Power Leads Us to Dehumanize Others"

• BPS Research Digest reviews research that vindicates Lord Acton. (Not that there was much doubt to begin with). 

"Ratzinger is an Enemy of Humanity"

• Richard Dawkins brilliantly responds to the Pope's deeply idiotic comment comparing atheists to Nazis. Read it. 

"Confirmation Bias in Science: How to Avoid It"

• Excellent piece at Ars Technica by Chris Lee on the evils of confirmation bias - our tendency to see only what we expect to see. Lee looks at the topic through the lens of various scientific controversies, including Jacques Benveniste's 'water memory' nonsense. 

"'Science Cop' Mugged"

• China's answer to Ben Goldacre, Fang Shimin, gets beaten up and threatened, apparently by plagiarists and/or charlatans who stand to lose from being exposed. Shocking. 

"Religion causes a chronic biasing of visual attention"

• Another fascinating study covered by BPS Research Digest.
• The researchers compared 'global' vs. 'local' thinking among "Dutch Conservative Calvinists (a form of Protestantism), Liberal Calvinists (who aren't so strict), Conservative Calvinists turned atheist and life-long atheists." 
• The results were surprising: "the life-long atheists showed the strongest bias for the big picture, followed by the Liberal Calvinists, and then the Conservative Calvinists and the former Conservative Calvinists turned atheist. The latter two groups performed similarly suggesting that more than seven years without religious practice wasn't enough to remove the effects of the religion on a person's attentional mindset."

Heh / LOL / Wow

"The Real Stuff White People Like"

• Absolutely fascinating analysis of 526,000 OkCupid profiles reveals the differences in tastes between White, Black and Asian males and females. 
• The sample is unlikely to be representative, but it's interesting nonetheless. 

"The Data So Far"

• Classic xkcd... (For xkcd n00bs: read the mouse-over text).

"2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year"

• Astronomy porn at its finest. #7 and #11 are especially good.

"The Future of the Universe"

• ...as an animated GIF. 

"Orations of a Pre-Post Colonial Oompa Loompa to His Revolutionary Brothers-in-Arms"

• Need I say more?

Three websites, three answers (aka Very Lazy Linking)

The web is a wonderful thing. Three questions, three wonderful resources to answer them:

1. How does homeopathy work?
2. Is there a God?
3. What happens after I die?

Problem. Solved.

Video: Bad Universe

So the most excellent Phil "the Bad Astronomer" Plait  has a new Discovery Channel show coming out called "Bad Universe". It seems to be based on his book Death From the Skies! about all the ways the universe could snuff us out. The first episode is on asteroids; and it looks frekkin awesome. Embedded below, or click here for the direct link.

The Randi Prayer

The beautiful Randi Prayer, by Crispian Jago of Science, Reason and Critical Thinking....

Our Conjuror

Who art in Florida

Amazing be thy name

Thy Million-Dollar Challenge

Will not be done

Give us this day

Empirical evidence

And debunk our irrationality

As we debunk those who make unsubstantiated claims to us

And lead us not into woo woo

But deliver us from credulity

For thine is the rationality

The logic and the reason

Until unequivocal evidence proves otherwise

Picture: Zapiro's follow-up

In all the hullabaloo over Draw Mohammad Day, I forgot to point to cartoonist Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro's follow-up cartoon. You'll recall that this cartoon of Zapiro's - in my view one of the best drawn for Draw Mo Day - caused quite a stir, and Shapiro even received death threats. Anyway, Zapiro followed-up with the following (click for a bigger version):

Video: Holy Shit Man Walks on Fucking Moon

Okay, so I've probably been posting too many videos of late, but this is just awesome. It's video rendition of the Onion piece (in Our Dumb Century) on the moon landing. It's embedded below, and here's the direct link:



By the way, if anyone wants to make me really happy, buy me a framed copy of the piece from the Onion store... :-)

(HT: David Spurrett).

Video: Dara O Briain on quackery

Dara O Briain really gets it. And he's damn funny to boot. Check this out (or click here):



(HT to Hugh Pastoll).

Fun with fossils

So the fiancée, her family and I had a lovely holiday in Clarens (Google Maps) over the December holidays. While there, we took a day trip to the Golden Gate National Park (go if you have a chance, it's gorgeous) and to everyone's delight, I discovered some fossils! Well, I think they're fossils - they certainly look like fossils to me. But, obviously, I'm no paleontologist so I might be entirely wrong. (Angela, the aforementioned fiancée, already blogged about the incident by the way). Anyway, some of the best pictures are below the fold.

Picture: Family chain-mail fun...

Yup.

(source).

Fun with Search Terms II

So back in August I did a post on the weird search terms people find my blog with, and it was so much fun that I think I'll do similar posts irregularly. Here are a few of the oddest ones culled from my Google Analytics account...

• enchanted aardvark sign (umm... wtf?)
• vicks rub sex fun penis (a bit of advice: don't. Srsly). 
• e ionian lick (kinky, a whole region of Ancient Anatolia licks stuff...)
• famous ellipses (aren't all ellipses equally famous? or are some ellipses more equal than others?)
• absolute nude simon singh boobs (so I thought the one about Neil deGrasse Tyson in the last edition was bad, but seriously now. Simon Singh's boobs? He doesn't even have man titties for God's sake!) 
• chiropractic medicine in durban violence (yup, when you let a chiropractor near your spine, it's ipso facto an act of violence...)
• witchcraft and geckos (I knew those little bastards were in league with witches! Maybe we could check whether they weigh the same as a duck...)
• interesting family porn (all family porn is interesting, surely? well, in a deeply disgusting way that is)
• sex enchantment of god (wow... the ultimate ego boost: enchanting god into having sex with you!)
• woman with monkey sex (a Mexican donkey show is bad enough, but monkeys? Gross). 
• churchill burst into flames (my history isn't all that good, but I'm pretty sure THIS never happened).
• alien impregnation of women porno video (note to porn surfers: this is not a porn blog, let alone a Hentai porn blog, so GTFO and take your perversions with you). 
• do my eyes change color because im evil (Gawd superstition is bad for you. No dammit, it doesn't make you evil). 
• women shouldn't do magic (no one can do real magic, so that's a bit redundant, eh?) 
• ionia should stick (stick and lick? Sigh).
  

Non-weird search terms...

It always surprises me which posts become popular, and what posts end up attracting readers from the search engines. A preposterous number of people do searches - with a dizzying array of different search terms - about chameleon camouflage. Also surprising is how many people search for that video about a cement cast of an ant colony and similarly popular (probably as a consequence of Dawkins' latest book) are terms about fox domestication.

Video: Glorious Dawn

Check out this awesome song: "Glorious Dawn - Cosmos Remixed" 'by' Carl Sagan (ft. Stephen Hawking). It's embedded below, or you can click here.



(Via Owen Swart)

Picture: Fun with homeopathy

I just can't resist posting the following, courtesy of Hell's News Stand.:

(Via Science-Based Medicine).

PhD Comics on open access

The most excellent Ph.D Comics on open access (click to enlarge):


(Oh, and don't miss out on 'Nature vs. Science' Parts One, Two and Three).

Friday Fun: A brief history of religion

Fun with skeptical songs

The most excellent Daniel Loxton (author of the important manifesto "Where do we go from here?" [pdf]) has put together a fun list of freely-available skeptical songs. There are some pretty cool songs, I especially recommend "Carbon Cycle" [mp3] by Hard ’n Phirm and "Cosmic Carl" [mp3] by Dr. SETI...

Oh, noes! Rational arguments!

I've linked to the always fantastic Onion a number of times now on this blog, but this article might be the best yet. It's just wonderful. Entitled "Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!", it beautifully sums up the tactics and mindset of quacks, pseudoscientists, religious fanatics and their fellow idiots. It's demolition by satire.

A snippet:

Gah! It's calmly and evenhandedly deflecting everything we're throwing at it. Our deductive fallacies are only making it stronger! Wait…what on earth is it doing now? Oh, no, it has sources! My God, it's defending itself with ironclad sources! Someone stop the citing! Please, please stop the citing!

The language is impenetrable! For all that is good and holy, backpedal with all your might!