A most bizarre and mysterious cocoon

August 29, 2013 • 9:53 am

by Matthew Cobb

This bizarre photo was posted the other day on reddit’s “whatsthisbug” subreddit by Decapod73, with the following information: “Seriously, who makes egg cases like this? Just under 2cm across, Southern Peruvian Amazon”

The various suggestions in the discussion include moth/not moth, harvestman/not harvestman. No one has an answer so far.

Decapod73 says that s/he initially thought it was an ermine moth caterpillar that had started making a cocoon but then got distracted. But then more of the damn things started turning up… Cue creepy music.

Heres one on the underside of a tarpaulin, also by Decapod73 (this was posted a couple of months ago):

So. Ideas anyone? In particular, has anyone from Peru seen this kind of thing before? My guess is a small moth, but I think we need not only an ID, we also need an explanation for the “fencing” – is it to keep out predators? Are there other examples of fences in nature? And why the maypole? Is that again to deter ants or whatever?

Here’s something similar, a moth (?) cocoon that was photographed by Randy Emmit in 2011 that was spotted here by elijrus and linked to on the reddit page thing (I don’t know the correct reddit nomenclature). It looks like there’s an ant stuck in there, but it isn’t clear.

h/t @phil_torres on twitter

The bible of psychiatric diagnosis exempts religion from “delusions”, even though it is one

August 29, 2013 • 8:43 am

I’ve just finished reading a prepublication copy of Peter Boghossian’s book A Manual for Creating Atheists, which will be published by Pitchstone on November 1.  I recommend it highly, as it’s quite different from other atheist books.  Rather than going through the usual arguments against God and showing that religion is harmful and delusional, he takes these issues as givens and then tells the reader how to change other people’s minds, dispelling their faith.  He tries to turn the reader into what he calls a “street epistemologist,” skilled at arguing against religious beliefs in a way that will actually work.  His techniques are based on decades of experience in the classroom (he’s a philosopher who teaches courses in critical thinking and atheism at Portland state), in working with prisoners, and in one-on-one encounters with the faithful.

What I also like about the book is that he concentrates not on religion per se, but on the idea of faith as a failed epistemology.  He thinks (and I agree) that our greatest leverage against religion is its reliance on “faith”—belief without good evidence—as a “way of knowing,” a way that is simply not justifiable to a rational person. One of our best weapons against religion is simply to ask its adherents, “How do you know that?” And so Boghossian’s strategies are concentrated on going after faith, and not letting yourself get distracted by issues like the so-called beneficial effect of religion on morality.

So have a look at Peter’s book (he gave a terrific talk on it in June at TAM).  What I wanted to post, beyond this recommendation, was something in the book that I didn’t know.  The DSM of psychiatry, explained in the excerpt below, defines delusions in such a way that religion is really one of them. But then it exempts religion from the psychiatric diagnosis of “delusion” because it is widely held.  Here’s an excerpt from Peter’s book, which I post with his permission (the bolding is Peter’s, but I would have bolded it, too!):

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), is the single most important text used by clinicians. It is the diagnostic rulebook. Currently, the DSM grants religious delusions an exemption from classification as a mental illness. The following is the DSM-IV’s definition of delusion:

“A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility. Delusional conviction occurs on a continuum and can sometimes be inferred from an individual’s behavior. It is often difficult to distinguish between a delusion and an overvalued idea (in which case the individual has an unreasonable belief or idea but does not hold it as firmly as is the case with a delusion)” (2000, p. 765).

Again, religion gets a pass in society.  Why should someone’s belief be a delusion only if it’s held by a minority of people? In the important respect of being “an incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained,” and one that “defies credibility,” religion is a delusion. But note how religious faith is specifically exempted. Further, many individuals’ religious behaviors do indicate a delusional conviction (falling on one’s knees and talking to an imaginary friend, eating wafers, bowing toward Mecca five times a day, and so on).

Richard Dawkins’s book was properly named The God Delusion, although of course that angered the faithful, who don’t want to be seen as delusional.  If 80% of the population suddenly became schizophrenic, would that no longer be seen as a mental disorder because it’s common?

What is important, I think, is not the frequency of a “disorder”—whether it deviates from the “norm”—but whether it inhibits one’s well-being or leads to behaviors that interrupt one’s life and rest on distorted views of reality (e.g., obsessive-compulsive disorder).  The fact is that if, say, evangelical Christianity were the sole religion in the world, and was seen in only 2% of the population, the DSM would classify it as a delusional disorder.

Does science make you moral?

August 29, 2013 • 6:12 am

Several readers have called my attention to a new paper in PLoS ONE by Christine Ma-Kellams and Jim Blascovich, psychologists from the University of California at Santa Barbara, supposedly showing that reading about science in an experimental study makes one behave more morally and altruistically. They also claim to show that studying science improves your moral judgment (reference below; download is free.) I say “supposedly” and “claim” because I don’t find the paper terribly convincing.

The authors did four experiments, three of them using the same protocol to “prime” the subjects with science or with a “neutral” non-science task. The authors’ predicted that “the notion of science as part of a broader moral vision of society [i.e., Enlightenment values] facilitates moral and prosocial judgments and behaviors.”  And that’s what they found, in all four studies.  I’ll briefly describe the experiments and results.

Study 1. This used 48 undergraduates from UCSB.  All of them first read a date-rape story in which a guy drives a woman home, the woman invites him in for a drink, and then he has “nonconsensual sex” (a euphemism for “rape”, I guess) with her. Afterwards, the participants answered questions about their field of study and how wrong they thought the man’s act was (on a scale from 1–completely right, to 100–completely wrong). They also answered the question “How much do you believe in science?” on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much).

Results:  Field of study was correlated with greater moral condemnation with rape, with science students being significantly (p = 0.01) more condemning than nonscience students.  Belief in science was also positively correlated with moral condemnation (p <0.001).

Problems here include use of a small pool of college undergraduates, correlation that doesn’t show causation (perhaps more ‘moral’ students tend to gravitate to or are more accepting of science), and lack of replication, as this was a one-time study. It’s also not clear whether the science-friendly students would actually behave more morally. Answering one question doesn’t show that you are generally “more moral” than others.

Studies 2,3, and 4.  These studies used 33 undergraduates, 32 volunteers from the area, and 43 participants between 18 and 22 from the university’s “research participation pool,” respectively.

In all three studies, the participants got a list of five scrambled words from which they had to choose four to make a complete sentence.  The “science” condition contained words like “logical”, “hypothesis”, “theory”, “laboratory” and “scientists.” The controls had a list of five nonscience words; they give the example of “shoes give replace old the.” There were thus two primes: a science one and a “control” one. Then each of the three groups was subject to a different test, described under “results” below.

Results, study 2.  After their prime, students read the same date-rape scenario and made their 1-100 moral judgment.  The subjects primed with science words were more condemnatory of rape (p  = 0.04).

Problems here include small sample size again, a probability that is barely significant (0.05 is the cut-off level), and a worry that this ranking (82 for control primes, 96 for science primes) isn’t a good indicator of moral behavior.

Results, study 3. Students, after priming, completed a “prosocial intentions measure,” which included “the likelihood of engaging of each of several behaviors in the following month, including prosocial activities (donating to charity, giving blood, volunteering, and distractor activities (attending a party, going on vacation, seeing a movie).”  The subjects primed with science reported greater prosocial intentions relative to controls (p = 0.024).

Problems are again small sample size unrepresentative of the general population, a probability that isn’t all that impressive, and the uncertainty that reporting your intentions doesn’t mean you’ll actually fulfill those intentions.

Results, study 4.  After priming, students took a standard “economic exploitation” test; each was given five one-dollar bills and told to divide the money between themselves and another anonymous participant (there was no opportunity for the other person to reject the dosh). After the experiment was over, both participants got $5 anyway. In this case alone there was an effect of gender, with women keeping more money for themselves than did men (p = 0.03), but there was no gender X prime interaction, and those primed with science gave away significantly more money than those receiving the control prime (p = 0.046).

Problems are again small sample size, nonrepresentative population, and a probability that is barely significant (agai,  0.05 is the cutoff).

Note that in the last three studies, the possibility that science-y people were more moral a priori was not an issue, as the priming tests were allocated randomly among participants, regardless of their area of study.

The authors conclude that “Taken together the present results provide support for the idea that the study of science itself independent of the specific conclusions reached by scientific inquiries holds normative implications and leads to moral outcomes.”  Well, only the study #1 had anything to say about the “study of science,” as it was the only one that tested science students vs. non-science students. “Priming” with words in the other three studies has nothing to do with “the study of science.”

What this study shows is simply a need for further studies, as sample sizes were small and probabilities often marginal. But I am wary of assessing how moral or altruistic someone is from their response to a single test.  That itself would need validation by correlating test performance with moral or altruistic behavior in the real world, something that has ever been done, much less can be done.

Further, tests like these are in severe need of replication. For example, the authors mention the paper of Vohs and Schooler (free download at link) showing that reading about humans’ lack of free will made them more likely to cheat on a subsequent task. That paper got a lot of attention. But, as I’ve written about before, the Vohs and Schooler paper  was not replicated in a subsequent study by Rolf Zwaan at the University of Rotterdam. Zwaan found no difference in cheating behavior after participants read a piece a piece by Francis Crick on the illusory nature of free will vs. those who read a “control” piece by Crick. Ma-Kellams and Blascovich don’t mention the failure of replication.  And of course their own tests need to be replicated on larger and more diverse populations.

I’ve been hard on this study precisely because it produced the results I’d like to see: studying science is good for your behavior.  The connection between the two is not as obvious to me as to the authors, but maybe it’s true.  But the differences were small, and I’m not sure what the implications would be even if the results were real. As Feynman said, the main purpose of science is to keep you from fooling yourself, so we must be extra cautious about accepting results that meet our preconceptions.

Note, too, that the paper was published in PLoS ONE, which is a journal that doesn’t review papers for novelty or generality.  The journal will publish anything so long as the experiments seem to have been performed properly.  There have been some good papers in that journal, but I regard it largely as a dumping ground for papers that can’t meet the more rigorous standards of other journals.  With increasing pressure to publish, scientists can turn to journals like this to publish nearly anything, so long as the experiment was properly designed and properly analyzed. I’m not saying that this paper was not interesting, but if the results were so momentous why did the authors send them to PLoS ONE?

/critique

_____________

Ma-Kellams, C., and J. Blascovich. 2013. Does Science Make You Moral? The Effects of Priming Science on Moral Judgments and Behavior. PLoS ONE 8:e57989 EP

In which I sell out to become famous

August 28, 2013 • 1:50 pm

Well, I’ve turned down every invite I’ve had to write for PuffHo, for I don’t like their policy of exploiting writers by paying them nothing while the PuffHo drags in huge amounts of money.

But they made me an offer I can’t refuse: they wanted to publish my “Rock and roll is dead” post.  I said okay, on the condition that this is a one-time thing. I’m just curious what kind of reaction it will receive, but, more important, I wanted to see if it could draw fresh blood to this site (not that we need any!).

Anyway, the post is up, and for the nonce is on the front page.  Go quickly, because it will soon disappear when we start bombing Syria. Granted, it’s not the cover of Rolling Stone, but that’ll do, pig; that’ll do.

But it will always be in the entertainment section, right next to Miley Cyrus twerking.

The comments should be interesting.

And I promise not to do this again.

Picture 1
Fame at last!

Front page (use your magnifying glass to see Professor Ceiling Cat at the bottom left):

Picture 2

Leaving faith behind: a reader’s story

August 28, 2013 • 11:46 am

I’ve exchanged a few emails with reader Matthew, who has his own website called Confessions of a (former) young earth creationist. He originally sent me pictures of himself with monkeys from his childhood in Africa (this was prompted by yesterday’s girl-with-baby-gorilla post), but also mentioned something about being the son of missionaries and how he gave up his Christianity. When I asked him for more information, he sent me a detailed account of how he was weaned from faith, and how painful the repercussions had been.

This reminded me that my own “conversion,” which was virtually instantaneous, is not the norm, and that many of the deeply religious have to sever many ties, with great difficulty, when they abandon their faith.  It also reminds us that, despite the claims of accommodationists, learning science and evolution can be a powerful way to lever people out of religion.

We often hear from accommodationists that evolution and science are not inimical to faith, but really, who believes that?  If you accept and appreciate science, you are buying into a completely different way of finding out what’s true than does religion, whose supposed “truths” rest entirely on indoctrination, revelation, dogma, and authority.  The methods of science for learning about the universe are the complete opposite.  And so if you learn to doubt and question, and ask for evidence, then you will —if rational—inevitably apply those practices to faith claims. If you’re intellectually honest, you’ll become an atheist.

Everyone knows this, but accommodationists pretend otherwise. “Religion and evolution are not inimical,” say the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and so on.  They’re wrong and they know it. That’s public relations, not truth. The fact is that science has been remarkably effective at turning religious people into nonbelievers, and never has the opposite effect. It weakens faith rather than buttresses it.

Matthew’s story, told below in his own words, testifies to this. But it also testifies to a lot of other stuff, too. As nonbelievers (many of us from birth) we should remember how hard it is for some people to give up beliefs they’ve held for a lifetime, one reason being that this can weaken or sever ties to those you love.

I’m grateful to Matthew for giving me permission to put up the following:

******

My family moved to Zambia in about 1970 and I returned to the UK at 18, so my entire childhood was effectively based in the missionary culture there. I have recently turned my back on Christianity and the creationism I was taught as a child and its since then that I have found your blog and have been following it for a couple of years now.

Shedding my faith was a long process; it was painful rather than difficult. It began with the gradual realisation that I was wrong about evolution. The more I studied the more I realised that shallowness of creationism and the depth of scientific understanding.

It all started when I began listening to podcasts and I grabbed a selection of religious and scientific podcasts, among others. Two that stand out were the Skeptics Guide to the Universe and AstronomyCast. I heard science talked about in ways that interested me and, more than that, I heard why that science was right. This was very important. SGU also gave me a good introduction to being critical in my thinking. When I compared these (and other science podcasts) to the Christian equivalents, I found that the creationist position wasn’t satisfying. To be blunt, creationism is more about denying and objecting than it is about actual science. This was my wake up call and I started soaking up as much evolutionary information as I could. I moved to reading blogs as well as listening to podcasts, and a few short years later I realised that I no longer had a logical foundation on which to base my Christianity. Intellectually it was a great relief. Emotionally, it was a difficult ride.

More than once on your blog you have stated that the Christian story needs the first chapters of Genesis. This was my conclusion too. I tried hard to reconcile the rest of the Bible with the fact that the garden of Eden is a myth, along with the flood, the Tower of Babel and the exodus from Egypt. I could not do it. It was really that simple—you take those away and the whole shebang collapses.

I did flirt with the idea of a liberal Christianity but found it unfulfilling. The pain comes from the life lived immersed in Christianity. It took me a full 3 years to come clean to my wife—and only then because I reached a point where I had no choice. I no longer go to church, which makes me happier; but the cost to the marriage is hard to measure because I have removed the single most important thing we shared for many years. She is a good and loving wife, but it is an emotional thing for both of us and takes some adjustment. On a personal level I swing between being anti-religion and being tolerant of it. It’s a difficult balance to reach because my entire friends and family circle is Christian. My two best friends from my 20s are now both Church of England vicars, and they knew me as a dedicated Christian man.

I have not lost any friends over my decision, of which I am glad, but I do know they pray for me and they are sad I have made this decision. It’s hard not to feel insulted by that and I have to keep reminding myself that they do it because they love me.

Leaving my faith was not hard—once I started down the proper route of logic and evidence it wasn’t a difficult decision to make. But it was painful because of the consequences and the emotional adjustments and conversations.

I have reached the point where I do not wish to actively hide my atheism. I think doing that caused more damage than the revelation would have and that was a difficult lesson to learn. Hiding it made me dishonest and I do not wish to do that any longer. I hid it out of fear for the hurt and disappointment I would cause others. There were many times I wanted to confide in people close to me, but telling a fellow Christian that you now reject what you once shared is a surprisingly difficult thing to do.

I’ve been lent books by those who now know: one in particular is the awful ‘Does God Believe in Atheists?’. I do know these Christians mean well, because I was once one, but they don’t realise that they are actually being patronising and disrespectful. It’s hard not to get angry because they are just doing what they think is right. But it’s just the wrong thing to do to me because I’ve been there and believed as they do. Sadly, what I want from them is a challenging discussion, but I know they will never start one because they think it’ll be seen as confrontational. What they are trying to do is to ‘love me into the kingdom’.

To be honest I’d love to turn my back on church and live a life that never has to engage with it again. That will never happen though, so instead I have to make the best of the life I have and find a solution that works. This is where the challenge is for me now. The closest friends we currently socialise with are great people, yet they include the Church minister and his wife, I am the sole atheist, conversation will invariable include church or Christianity. The only way I can socialise with fellow atheists and remove religion from the conversation is to is to do so on my own.

I struggle a lot with stridency, and I often find the rhetoric of Dawkins and others, even yourself, difficult to read. This is because I find it very easy to read the words from the religious perspective and I know my former self would find them deeply uncomfortable, even offensive. Sometimes it’s deserved, other times I am not so sure and it’s at those times I wonder if it’s really worth putting those words out there. Stridency never helped me leave the faith; more than likely it delayed my leaving because it gave me reason to encamp in it.

I am at peace with the decision I have made and I do not regret it at all. The challenge for me is to navigate the maze I now find before me.

For No One

August 28, 2013 • 8:33 am

This song is one of the reasons I see “Revolver” (1966) as the best Beatles album ever. “For No One” is number 40 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs. It’s clearly pure McCartney, although of course the writing credits are “Lennon-McCartney.”  It’s short—only a tad over two minutes long—but complete, and the famous French horn solo (suggested, of course, by George Martin) is a fantastic touch. In fact, it makes the song.

I may be wrong, but the Beatles may have been the first rock group to use classical instruments and arrangements as a major part of their music. (There were of course earlier attempts: I’m thinking of “True Love Ways” with Buddy Holly, one of my favorite songs, and one that uses not only a full orchestra but some jazz saxophone licks.)

Rolling Stone gives some musical details:

The intimacy of the production and performance — a kind of exhausted acceptance — stand out amid the accelerated experimentation everywhere else on Revolver. McCartney and Starr were the only Beatles present at the session; they cut the backing track — McCartney’s piano and Starr’s minimalist percussion, plus overdubbed clavichord — in a single night. George Martin later suggested a dash of brass, so they called in Alan Civil of the London Philharmonia, who played the song’s brief, moving French-horn interjections. Civil was paid about 50 pounds for his efforts, but got something more valuable: a rare Beatles-album credit on Revolver‘s original back cover.

Wikipedia describes the song’s genesis:

McCartney recalls writing “For No One” in the bathroom of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps while on holiday with his then girlfriend Jane Asher. He said, “I suspect it was about another argument.” The lyrics end enigmatically with “. . . a love that should have lasted years…” The song’s working title was “Why Did It Die?” It is built upon a descending scale progression with a refrain that modulates to the supertonic minor.

The song was recorded on 9, 16 and 19 May 1966. McCartney sang and played clavichord (rented from George Martin’s AIR company), piano and bass guitar, while Ringo Starr played drums and tambourine. John Lennon and George Harrison did not contribute to the recording.

The French horn solo was by Alan Civil, a British horn player described by recording engineer Geoff Emerick as the “best horn player in London”. During the session, McCartney pushed Civil to play a note that was beyond the usual range of the instrument. According to Emerick, the result was the “performance of his life.” Civil said that the song was “recorded in rather bad musical style, in that it was ‘in the cracks’ neither B-flat nor B-major. This posed a certain difficulty in tuning my instrument.”

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Paul McCartney and Jane Asher

Jane Asher has had a distinguished career as author and actress, but—along with 50 gazillion teenagers—I’ll always remember her as The Girl Who Got Paul. And, according to Wikipedia, she dumped him:

In 1963, Asher interviewed the Beatles and began a five-year relationship with Paul McCartney, to whom she became engaged in 1967. She accompanied McCartney to India in February 1968 to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. After discovering McCartney in bed with Francie Schwartz she ended the relationship on 20 July 1968.

The reference for the last sentence is McCartney’s biography, Many Years From Now. Since the book was approved by the Paul (and includes a lot of his own words), the description above is surely accurate.

Martin Luther King: The Speech

August 28, 2013 • 5:17 am

If you’ve already Googled something today, you’ll have seen this:

Picture 1And you’ll know what it’s commemorating. (I swear that the guy in the doodle looks more like Obama than King, and I think it is—a sign of how far we’ve come.)

Today is the 50th anniversary of perhaps the most famous speech of our times: Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. on August 28, 1963. Although I lived in the D.C. suburbs then, I was too young to be a political activist, and thus missed the chance to hear this live.  But I’ve heard it many times since, and you should listen to it today (it’s about 17 minutes) not only for its immense historical value, but because it’s the greatest piece of rhetoric I’ve ever heard. Notice how his use of repetition accentuates his message. (And find the one bit lifted from Shakespeare.)

Most of us don’t remember the times when segregation was simply a fact of life, but when I got to college in Virginia in 1967, I noticed in that in the bus station there were two bathrooms for each sex, and two water fountains. Only later did I realize that those were the old “black” and “white” bathrooms and fountains, from which the signs had recently been removed.

It now seems impossible to imagine that it was illegal for blacks to share bathrooms and water fountains with whites. Those times have gone forever, at least in the civilized world. As King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I’d urge readers to close their eyes and take a few minutes to listen to the speech, remembering that when it was given it was necessary.

The Speech proper starts 48 seconds into this video.

You can download the full text of King’s speech from the National Archives. And, over at Panda’s Thumb, reader Joe Felsenstein (a renowned evolutionary biologist and quite the radical when young) has posted his reminiscences of attending the March on Washington and hearing King’s speech live.