Cassini reveals clues about Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes and seas | Science Recorder

Cassini reveals clues about Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes and seas | Science Recorder

P.J. O’Rourke - American Satirist, Journalist and Author | Point of Inquiry

P.J. O’Rourke - American Satirist, Journalist and Author | Point of Inquiry

The News About the Universe Isn't Good

The News About the Universe Isn't Good

Hitchens didn't think rejecting religion would solve everything. But he knew only reason would give us justice by Jeffrey Tayler @ Salon

Christopher Hitchens (Credit: AP/Chad Rachman)

 

David Strumfels -- You might prefer the original article at

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/14/the_real_new_atheism_rejecting_religion_for_a_just_world/

 

The ever-polemical atheist author Christopher Hitchens died two years ago this month, yet his incisive, erudite diatribes against religion continue to rile the faithful and spark debate. The latest anti-Hitch outburst comes from Sean McElwee, a writer and researcher of public policy who describes himself as “a poorly practicing Christian who reads enough science to be functional at dinner parties.” McElwee calls for a “truce” between believers and nonbelievers. But he stands on the losing side of both public opinion trends and history. According to a Pew poll conducted in 2012, a record number of young Americans – a quarter of those between the ages of 18 and 29 — see themselves as unaffiliated with any religion. Atheists’ ranks are swelling, and believers are finding it increasingly difficult to justify their faith.

McElwee begins by calling the New Atheist movement “a rather disturbing trend” in a country “whose greatest reformer” – Martin Luther King, Jr. – “was a Reverend.” Dr. King won fame as a civil rights leader, not as a religious figure. McElwee would do well to recall the words of Founding Father John Adams: “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” McElwee goes on to attribute to New Atheists an unsound premise of his own concoction:

1.  The cause of all human suffering is irrationality
2.  Religion is irrational
3.  Religion is the cause of all human suffering

Hitchens’ most notorious atheistic tome is entitled “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” But no serious reader could conclude from this book (or from the writings of the other New Atheists — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — whom McElwee also hopes to debunk) that he considers religion the sole wellspring of humankind’s woes. Though he derided religion long before and after he published “God Is Not Great,” Hitchens never said any such thing, and no reasonable person would believe it. Are cancer and flesh-eating bacteria manifestations of irrationality? What about about wars over territory or natural resources? Poverty and inequality?
Bullying and bulimia? The “classical logical error of post hoc ergo propter hoc” McElwee ascribes to New Atheists simply does not exist.

McElwee then jumps to Hitchens’ (misbegotten) support of the second Iraq war and attempts to press it into service to discredit him in matters of faith. Hitchens, as McElwee correctly notes, opposed the 1991 invasion of Iraq, but when George W. Bush was in office, according to McElwee, Hitchens “decided that, in fact, bombing children was no longer so abhorrent” because the 2003-2011 conflict was to be a “final Armageddon between the forces of rationality and the forces of religion.” No, this was not how Hitchens viewed the second Iraq war. He advocated invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam, who was, he contended, guilty of crimes against humanity, and he (mistakenly) assumed a stable democracy would result from the dictator’s ouster.

Hitchens understood the secular nature of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, which made all the more puzzling and problematic his stubborn insistence that Saddam was colluding with Al Qaeda. But McElwee then asserts that “the force of rationality and civilization was led by a cabal of religious extremists” – in the Bush administration — which “was of no concern for Hitchens.” George W. Bush was a convert to Evangelical Christianity, which does not necessarily make him a “religious extremist,” and the (mixed) faiths of the Iraq War’s other architects (Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, et al.) did not fuel their zeal for deposing Saddam.

McElwee proceeds to mischaracterize Hitchens’ post-9/11 worldview as a “war between the good Christian West and the evil Muslim Middle East.” How McElwee can expect us to believe this of Hitchens, who authored a book (“The Missionary Position”) denouncing Mother Theresa as a fraud and relentlessly attacked Christianity, baffles me, as does McElwee’s blindness to his own blunder. Is Hitchens now, according to him, pro-Christian?

McElwee also falsely attributes obscurantist motives to New Atheists. “Might it be better to see jihad as a response to Western colonialism and the upending of Islamic society, rather than the product of religious extremism? The goal of the ‘New Atheists’ is to eliminate centuries of history that Europeans are happy to erase, and render the current conflict as one of reason versus faith rather than what is, exploiter and exploited.”

Stripping jihad of its religious grounds invites nothing but confusion. Jihad in Arabic means “struggle,” but, with respect to Islam, denotes “a struggle in the name of faith,” which includes holy war against infidels waged as a matter of religious duty.  Such jihad is, ipso facto, religious. Informed readers also know that jihadists, in their addresses to the Muslim umma, rail against Western occupation of Islamic lands, “infidel” Western-backed dictators in Muslim countries, and so on — all the while citing passages from the Quran. Hitchens and Dawkins, both Europe-born and versed in their continent’s past – a past replete with religious and political conflicts of all kinds — have never sought to “erase” its history or present “the current conflict” as solely one of “reason versus faith.”
McElwee then tendentiously defines religion so as to paper over its often decisive role in precipitating conflicts. Though he allows that it might “motivate acts of social justice and injustice,” “[r]eligion is both a personal search for truth as well as a communal attempt to discern where we fit in the order of things.” Religion first and foremost consists of unsubstantiated, dogmatically advanced explanations for the cosmos and our place in it, with resulting universally applicable rules of conduct. A good many of these rules – especially those regarding women’s behavior and their (subservient) status vis-à-vis men, and prescriptions for less-than-merciful treatment of gays – are repugnant, retrograde, and arbitrary, based on “sacred texts” espousing “revealed truths” dating back to what the British atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell justly called the “savage ages.” (Islam by no means has a monopoly on such rules – check Leviticus for its catalogue of “crimes”: working on the Sabbath, cursing one’s parents, being the victim of rape – that merit the death penalty.) Just how such “holy” compendia of ahistorical, often macabre fables are supposed to help anyone in a “personal search for truth” mystifies me.

Lacking any alternative, McElwee then tells nonbelievers to lay off the faithful: “any critique of religion that can be made from the outside (by atheists) can be made more persuasively from within religion.” The last time I checked, those “within religion” who denounce religion as untrue, unfounded on fact, irrational by its nature and preying upon our fears, would in fact be atheists. The problem is not, as McElwee says, “the Church’s excesses” – but the Church itself, its backward rules, its reactionary ethos, its groundless assertion of moral authority. The latter is laughable, especially regarding the Catholic Church, in view of the catalogue of crimes – including the persecution of Jews, the Crusades, the Inquisition and silence with respect to Hitler’s Final Solution — for which it bears self-admitted guilt. If one breaks free of the racket of faith, then faith-sanctioned strictures, fantastic tales (human parthenogenesis among them) demanding faith to be believed, to say nothing of the justness of tax exemptions for faith organizations, all appear as entirely human creations that are questionable at best, criminal at worst, and certainly deserving of no kid-glove treatment.

“The impulse to destroy religion will ultimately fail,” McElwee claims. Just what he means by this is unclear. Hitchens spoke out tirelessly against religion but never believed it could be eradicated; rather, he likened it to Camus’ plague-infected rats, scurrying about in humanity’s sewer, ever awaiting a chance to reemerge. Hitchens certainly never foresaw the bizarre scenario McElwee outlines: “Banish Christ and Muhammad and you may end up with religions surrounding the works of Zizek and Sloterdijk (there is already a Journal of Zizek Studies, maybe soon a seminary?).
Humans will always try to find meaning and purpose in their lives, and science will never be able to tell them what it is.” New Atheists have never assigned science such a role. Hitchens himself often recommended the consolations of literature for this purpose. The broader point rationalists make is simple: People, having set aside fairy tales and mandated moral certainties delivered from on high, must seek meaning on their own, seek to order society in ways beneficial for all, and do so with reason as lodestar.

So what is to be done? McElwee trots out the idea of a truce – “one originally proposed by the Catholic church and promoted by the eminent Stephen J. Gould,” that “Science, the study of the natural world, and religion, the inquiry into the meaning of life (or metaphysics, more broadly) constitute non-overlapping magisteria.” One straightaway must regard as suspect a “truce” advocated by an organization guilty of repressing scientists and opposing the scientific Weltanschauung. And one would be right to be suspicious, according to McElwee’s proposition: “Neither [science nor religion] can invalidate the theories of the other, if such theories are properly within their realm.” Just what the boundaries of those realms are and who decides them have been matters of contention since time immemorial. Just ask Galileo.

McElwee next concludes that “religion (either secular or theological) does not poison all of society and science should not be feared, but rather embraced.”

No one is waiting for McElwee’s green light to “embrace” science, which holds its place among us by virtue of its proven utility, its lab-tested veracity. At this point, McElwee’s second citation of Martin Luther King cannot avail him. “Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.” Dr. King’s saying this does not make it so. Faith and reason are fighting for supremacy the world over, and rationalists must make their case with ardor, shying away from no battle. Atheists who wobble in defense of nonbelief would do well to recall 9/11, Baruch Goldstein’s Hebron massacre of Palestinians, the Salem witch trials and violence meted out in the name of religion to “unchaste” women throughout the ages. This is, of course, an incomplete list of atrocities motivated by religion.

The sooner we accord priests, rabbis and imams the same respect we owe fabulists and self-help gurus, the faster we will progress toward a more just, more humane future. Enlightenment must be our goal, and that was what Hitchens advocated above all.

 

                

Jeffrey Tayler is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. His seventh book, "Topless Jihadis -- Inside Femen, the World's Most Provocative Activist Group," will be published on December 20 as an Atlantic ebook. Follow @JeffreyTayler1 on Twitter. More Jeffrey Tayler.

Standing Up for Sex by Henry Gee

Humans evolved the ability to walk on two legs because it allowed them to more accurately size up prospective mates. Or did they?

 

By Henry Gee | December 1, 2013

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, OCTOBER 2013It happened years ago, but the event was so traumatic that I remember it as if it were yesterday: an elderly professor physically pinned me against a wall and berated me for rejecting his paper on why human ancestors got up on their hind legs and walked. “The reason,” frothed the empurpled sage, “was to make it easier for mothers to carry babies close to their chests.” See? So blindingly obvious that anyone, even I, could understand it.

Manuscripts seeking to explain the evolutionary roots of human bipedalism land in my in-box at Nature with monotonous regularity. We became bipeds so that we could carry food, or tools; so we could see farther; so we wouldn’t expose so much of our skin to the Sun; so we could wade better in rivers and lakes. They all make good stories, but they all share the same error—they are explanations after the fact, and, as such, betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works.

Natural selection, the mechanism of evolution, operates without memory or foresight. It has no intention. It is we who choose to interpret evolutionary purposes as such later on. The features of living things, therefore, do not evolve for any preconceived purpose that we can discern. I explain how such misunderstandings color our understanding of human evolution in my latest book, The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution.

But none of this stops me having my own go at understanding why humans came to walk on two legs. In my view, it all happened by accident.

Bipedalism is just one of the many peculiarities of human anatomy and behavior that set us apart from our closest relatives, the great apes. We are also much more social than they are, we have unusually large brains, we have much more body fat, and we are much less hairy. The differential distribution of fat and hair happens to be strongly correlated with sexual dimorphism.

On the subject of sex, women’s furless breasts are prominent at all times, not just when women are lactating. Unlike female chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives, women do not advertise estrus—the time of maximum fertility—by the swelling of the sexual organs. And while we’re talking about advertisement, men have the largest penises, relative to body mass, of any ape. A male gorilla might weigh twice as much as an adult human, but he’s lucky if he ever gets an erection more than inch long.

But if humans’ prominent breasts and big penises are made obvious by hairlessness, they are made more so by bipedalism, which displays everything for all to see. In which case, standing upright could be a by-product of sexual selection, in which mates choose one another on the basis of features that might represent outward signs of inward genetic health.

Some sexually selected features, though, appear have been chosen at random when, by chance, a trait in one sex becomes associated with the preference for that trait in the other, leading to runaway positive feedback, survival value be damned. The massive train of the peacock is a good example. It looks flashy and attracts mates, but costs a great deal of energy to make and maintain, and hobbles a peacock trying to flee from predators. The transition to bipedalism might be seen in the same way: it was selected because it better advertised our sexual wares, but hobbled us in other ways.

The imposition of walking upright on a fundamentally quadrupedal design has prompted a thorough reworking of the entire human body, making back pain one of the single biggest causes of worker absenteeism in the world. Rather than an adaptation, bipedalism could be a dreadful kludge, forced on us by sexual selection in defiance of gravity and common sense.

Now, I advance the above more than half in jest. It’s possibly no better or worse than any other idea, but I’m not going to pin anyone against a wall and shout about it.

Henry Gee is a senior editor at Nature, and the author of Jacob’s Ladder: The History of the Human Genome, In Search of Deep Time, and The Science of Middle-earth. Read an excerpt of The Accidental Species.

Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using light, nanoparticles

Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using light, nanoparticles

Pseudoscience and psychopathy

hunting pseudoscience in the internet jungle

Guest post on Skeptical Raptor by Matthew Facciani

There has been a news story creating some buzz lately regarding recent claims made by neuroscientist James Fallon, a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine. Dr. Fallon studied the brains of psychopaths for a few years and later saw that his brain was just like those of the psychopaths he studied. Many news outlets are picking up on this story as Dr. Fallon has just released a new book about it as well.

To summarize, Dr. Fallon had received a PET scan of his brain in conjunction with an Alzheimer’s disease study, and subsequently noticed that his PET scan image was eerily similar to PET scan images from those of the psychopaths he researched. These articles then reported how both the psychopaths and  Dr. Fallon had less activity in the frontal and temporal lobes which he claimed are linked to empathy, self-control, and morality. Beyond the PET scan results, Dr. Fallon mentions how he his family has the “Warrior Gene” which is associated with aggressive behavior.

Additionally, he admitted to some history of violence in his family. Despite all of these observations, Dr. Fallon claimed that he has led a normal life without violence. He argued that despite having genes which can promote aggression, a psychopathic brain, and a history of family violence, he did not turn into a psychopath because he did not have a traumatic childhood which could trigger psychopathic tendencies. Of course, his book will probably be a best seller as it brings up interesting questions and discussions about free will and criminal behavior.

As a neuroscientist myself, I was curious about the particular details about the specifics of Dr. Fallon’s brain imaging research. I searched through several news articles, listened to his NPR interview, and watched a talk he gave on the subject and was always left puzzled over the lack of details. I searched for ANY details regarding the PET scans Dr. Fallon mentioned, but every article simply had a pretty brain picture with little information. I was curious as to how a single brain scan from an unrelated study could predict psychopathic behavior.

Why didn’t anyone mention the details or link to an article that did? Specifically, I was confused on why Dr. Fallon was comparing his brain scan from an Alzheimer’s study to an unrelated study about psychopaths. Did they do the same task in each study? PET scans measure real time brain activity, so these brain activations seen in the pretty pictures reflect activity from some task. Despite this empirical data being crucial to make any sort of scientific inference, no article mentioned what the individuals being scanned were actually doing during the PET scan. Dr. Fallon argues that his own brain activity in the regions of the frontal and temporal cortex is lacking, similar to psychopaths, but fails to mention anything more specific in these interviews.

Morality, like any other high level cognition, is terribly difficult to study in the brain and there are a significant number of scientific articles trying to tease apart morality’s functional neuroanatomy. Higher-level cognitive processes are often derived from a complicated network of neural activation which requires careful experimental design to tease apart. A crucial issue with Dr. Fallon’s story is that we can’t even critique such an experimental design because he wasn’t even doing any sort of morality study! So to say that less frontal and temporal activity equals less morality is a gross oversimplification to begin with and there isn’t even any details to support such a claim.

Furthermore, even if Dr. Fallon’s was identical to a group of psychopathic brains, it would only prove association, not causation. There could be many factors which create differences in neural activity and a third variable (exposure to violence for example) could be the cause. Finally, neuroimaging studies are often based on the results of group analysis. Rarely is a single brain scan discussed in the results. Thus, comparing a single brain scan from one study to an aggregate of brain scans from an entirely different study isn’t just wrong, it’s unethical.

This is a classic example of poor scientific journalism and I believe it became so popular due to widespread deficits in scientific literacy. You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to see that there are huge problems with his story. You simply have view this story objectively have a healthy dose of skepticism without quickly deferring to the authority figure. There are simple questions which are never addressed here. What experiment was being done during each PET scan? If the psychopaths and Dr. Fallon were both completing a morality task and they both had low activity in certain regions, THEN that would be something more tangible. This is simply showing a brain picture and not asking questions. We know that people are much more likely to believe something if there is a brain picture associated with it and this is further proof.

My intention is not to claim that Dr. Fallon is lying and purposefully simplifying science to make a profit. I would need much more evidence for that. However, I am arguing that the news articles covering his story do not provide enough details to support his claims. I find it rather troubling that no one is even addressing this so I wanted to blog about it. It is also troubling that Dr. Fallon has not been more explicit about the limitations of his findings as he should surely be aware of them as an accomplished neuroscientist. America often ranks pretty poorly in scientific literacy and this is an example of the result. People should at least have a working understanding of the scientific method and not blindly believe an authority figure with an interesting story.

Matthew Facciani is a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate focused on cognitive neuroscience at a major Southern US research university. If you have questions for Mr. Facciani and his critiques, please drop a comment. 
Key citations:

• Bzdok D, Schilbach L, Vogeley K, Schneider K, Laird AR, Langner R, Eickhoff SB. Parsing the neural correlates of moral cognition: ALE meta-analysis on morality, theory of mind, and empathy. Brain Struct Funct. 2012 Oct;217(4):783-96. Epub 2012 Jan 24. PubMed PMID: 22270812; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3445793.
• Crampton P, Parkin C. Warrior genes and risk-taking science. N Z Med J. 2007 Mar 2;120(1250):U2439. PubMed PMID: 17339895.
• Lea R, Chambers G. Monoamine oxidase, addiction, and the “warrior” gene hypothesis. N Z Med J. 2007 Mar 2;120(1250):U2441. PubMed PMID: 17339897.
• Illes J, Kirschen MP, Gabrieli JD. From neuroimaging to neuroethics. Nat Neurosci. 2003 Mar;6(3):205. PubMed PMID: 12601375.
• McCabe DP, Castel AD. Seeing is believing: the effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition. 2008 Apr;107(1):343-52. Epub 2007 Sep 4. PubMed PMID: 17803985.