2008 Weblog Awards

Voting is open in the 2008 Weblog Awards... I voted for Neurologica (Steven Novella) in the Science Blog category, for Ask a Ninja for Best Video Blog, for Respectful Insolence for Best Medical / Health Blog, and for xkcd for Best Comic Strip.

Consider at least voting in the Science Blog category -- unfortunately, a couple of global warming-denialist blogs are in the running.

Wiseman blogs...

Richard Wiseman, "the Quirkologist" and the world's only professor of the public understanding of psychology, has finally started a blog... Go read!

(Via Skepchick).

Understanding Science

The Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science has declared 2009 the Year of Science. As part of this initiative, they've launched an excellent new website: Understanding Science. Hearteningly, the website focuses not on the content of science but on the process of science. Especially check out Understanding Science 101 and this great visualization of how science works.

For Google:
Science. How science works. Scientific explanation. Learn science. Become a scientist. Science 101. Science introduction. Science intro. What science is.

God & Africa

I rarely get really righteously indignant. But this bollocks by Matthew Parris that 'Africa needs God' pisses me off. So Parris, a South African-born English journalist and "confirmed atheist", traveled to Malawi and became convinced that Christianity makes an enormous contribution to Africa, distinct from its charity work. 'The rural African mind', you see, is deeply superstitious and fearful (its bugbears are 'evil spirits, ancestors, nature and the wild, tribal hierarchy, and quite everyday things') and focuses on 'the collective', which "grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity". Christianity, Parris contends, "smashes straight through [this] philosphical [sic]/spiritual framework" and, unlike other Africans, its converts thus "stand tall" and are 'liberated, relaxed, lively, engaged with the world, and curious'. "Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation," he concludes, "may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete."

There is so much wrong with this that I don't really know where to begin. But... The rural African mind? Wtf is the definite article doing in there? Let's do some revision, shall we? According to Wikipedia, Africa covers over 20% of the Earth's land surface and has almost a billion inhabitants, over 2,000 languages, hundreds of ethnic groups, and extremely diverse religious beliefs. (Traditional African religious beliefs are even more disparate). Generalizing about such a large number of diverse people strewn across a huge continent is difficult at best, and literally impossible without rigorous and statistically representative surveys. Wandering semi-randomly across the continent making biased observations will never, ever, equip you to make valid generalizations about Africa. (I'm not saying one cannot generalize, I'm saying doing so is impossible without proper statistics). At the absolutely minimum, then, Parris presents no evidence that his characterization of 'the rural African mind' is accurate or captures even a small amount of the variance in beliefs.

Similarly, Parris presents no compelling evidence for his hypothesis that conversion to Christianity causes Africans to 'stand tall'. All we get from him are some anecdotes: non-Christians are fearful and superstitious and Christians aren't. (Apparently, believing in a cosmic Jewish Zombie isn't an example of superstition). Someone really needs to tell Parris about confirmation bias: he sees support for his hypothesis everywhere only because he expects to and ignores disconfirming instances. Moreover, in the absence of experimental control, it is impossible to determine the direction of causality even if we grant the existence of a correlation: does Christianity make Africans more confident and curious (etc.) or do more confident and curious Africans become Christians in larger numbers? Or is there a third-factor (access to the education and support Christian charities provide, for example) that accounts for both? Pariss makes no observations that can distinguish between these alternatives.

Furthermore, why does Africa specifically need Christianity? While I grant that some ideologies may be more conducive to economic and societal success than others, Parris presents no evidence that Christianity (let alone only Christianity) is the right sort of ideology for Africa. Does Islam not "smash through" the African "philosphical [sic]/spiritual framework"? (Assuming such a thing exists and needs smashing). Does communism not teach people to "stand tall"? How about Afrocentrism? Or humanism? Or liberalism? Or, for that matter, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, or Frisbeetarianism? Is there any reason to think that the only (or best) way to a better future for Africa is via a detour through the Bible? Is cultural evolution strictly linear, so that Africans can only reach Europe's vaunted current state by going through a period of Christian superstition? Apart from asserting the tautology that one belief system must be replaced with another, Parris addresses none of these questions.

Parris, in short, overgeneralizes crassly, leaps to unwarranted conclusions, ignores a multitude of confounds, pays no attention to complexities, and disregards possibly disconfirming evidence. That his conclusion is also deeply insulting, borderline racist and mind-bogglingly patronizing is, of course, strictly irrelevant to its truth. Had he presented some evidence for his conclusion, I wouldn't have minded as much. But that he confidently asserts such an insulting proposition without any reasonably good evidence whatsoever is entirely unacceptable.

Mr. Parris, shut up.

Open Lab 2008

Bora at A Blog Around the Clock has released the list of entries to be included in this year's Open Labratory (a book published each year with a selection of the best blog posts around). A couple of picks:

• Dear Blue Lobster on the mysterious Bloop.

• Michael Nielsen on the internet and the future of science.

• Bayblab on anti-beard sentiment and hygiene.

• The Scientist on networking, Web 2.0 and science.

• Tomorrow's Table on 10 things about GMOs you can scratch from your worry-list.
  

Audio: Singh on Point of Inquiry

Simon Singh, the British science journalist and co-author of the excellent Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial (which I reviewed here), is this week's guest on the podcast Point of Inquiry. (Singh also appeared on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe a while back). I highly recommend the interview: alternative medicine is an interesting and important subject, DJ Grothe is an excellent host and Singh is reasonable and very knowledgeable.

I wonder if Edzard Ernst (Singh's co-author) has appeared on any (English) podcasts or radio shows about the book... anyone know?

Edge Question 2009

Every year Edge.org asks a group of notable thinkers a provocative question and the resulting answers usually makes for fascinating and thought-provoking reading. (I blogged about last year's question here). This year's question is "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?". I must say, I'm not a fan of the question: I agree with Pinker that it's an invitation to speculate wantonly... and look really dumb in 50 years. Human beings just aren't very good at predicting the future, and it seems likely that many things that won't change anything have been prophesied and the things that will change (nearly) everything have not. That said, several of the respondents focused on the relatively short-term and their speculations are therefore significantly more reasonable and interesting. My picks from among the latter:

Chris Anderson (the TED curator, not Wired editor) argues there will be a revolution in education due to the internet. Some of the best lecturers and teachers in the world, he says, will soon be available via video to anyone for free, unleashing a torrent of previously untapped talent and potential.

Jonathan Haidt's answer may prove to be the most controversial: the recent conclusion that evolution by natural selection may operate significantly faster than previously thought, he says, suggests there are significant biological differences between human groups. (He's careful to argue that these groups will likely not map onto social constructs like race).

Sam Harris thinks accurate and reliable lie-detectors will be invented in the next couple of decades, assuring that, whenever the stakes are high, truth-telling will be taken for granted.

Laurence Krauss' answer is deeply depressing, mostly because it's so plausible: the use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, for example, is certainly possible and Krauss is right that the consequences (social, political, environmental, intellectual) would be immense.

Nicholas Humphrey argues, in effect, that nothing will change everything because human nature is stubbornly persistent. We are far more technologically advanced than the Romans, he points out, but the major themes of the human biography - sex, children, politics, intrigue and so on - remain unchanged.

Craig Venter, predictably, thinks synthetic biology will change everything. He's probably right.

Other titbits:

Why oh why does the pseudoscientist and crackpot Rupert Sheldrake keep being included in this exercise? This time round Sheldrake argues the end of materialism is nigh. Sigh.

PZ Myers produced a wonderfully quotable quote: "We are not the progeny of gods, we are the children of worms; not the product of divine planning, but of cruel chance and ages of brutal winnowing."

The youngest respondent seems to be David Dalrymple, a 17 year-old MIT graduate student. Wow.

(Via: The Thinking Meat Project)

Change in Academia

I recently came across a very interesting new blog: Gideon Burton's Academic Evolution (tag line: "the order is changing, the change needs order") about the impact of Web 2.0 and associated developments on academia. Burton, a professor at Brigham Young University, has maintained a more general blog since late 2007, but created a breakaway blog in the hopes of emulating Chris Anderson (of "The Long Tail" and Wired fame) by writing a book via a blog.

Anyway, check out the blog -- it's certainly worth a read. Relatedly... Nature has an editorial out questioning the use of metric-based research assessment.