A NYT profile of E. O. Wilson and his new book

April 9, 2012 • 7:18 am

Today’s New York Times contains a nice profile by Jenny Schuessler of E. O. Wilson, “Lessons from ants to grasp humanity,” that concentrates on his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth (#38 on Amazon already!). I haven’t read the book, and don’t think I’ll be able to in the near future, so if you’ve read it do weigh in below.

Apparently the book deals with the evolution of our own species and the peculiar evolutionary conditions that allowed us to dominate the planet.  I was afraid—and this was confirmed by a rather unsatisfying review of the book by Michael Gazzaniga in the Wall Street Journal—that the book would be heavily larded with Wilson’s new views about the importance of group versus kin selection.  As I’ve posted on this site many times (e.g. here), Wilson and his colleagues Tarnita and Nowak now see “inclusive fitness”—natural selection that includes as its target the fitness of related individuals who share one’s genes—as an unimportant force in the social evolution, and see “group selection” (the differential proliferation of groups regardless of relatedness) as the main driver of the evolution of social behavior in species from insects to humans.

Thus, although Wilson’s book will undoubtedly be readable and instructive (Wilson is a very good writer, though not as good as Dawkins or Gould in his prime), I think his new book has potential to mislead the public, for he’s a widely read and influential scientist.  (As far as I know, he’s the only scientist who has won two Pulitzer Prizes.). And although he has almost no allies among evolutionary biologists in his emphasis on group selection, the book has the potential to convince the public that inclusive fitness is unimportant. That would be unfortunate.

In fact, in his desire to push his new group-selection ideas, Wilson has largely abandoned the ideas about social evolution that made him famous. In a piece by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker, for instance, Wilson expresses these views:

“I’ve always been an ambitious synthesizer,” he told me [Lehrer]. “But I’m now wise enough to know the limitations of that approach.” These days, he regards the books that made him famous—”Sociobiology” and “On Human Nature” (1979)—as flawed accounts of evolution, marred by their uncritical embrace of inclusive fitness. He’s prouder of an eight-hundred-page textbook that he wrote on Pheidole, the most abundant genus of ants.

This is tragic, and not just because some ant systematists think that his monograph on Pheidole is not up to snuff. When I said this about Wilson in Schuessler’s piece, I meant it:

“ ‘Sociobiology’ is still a very great book, and now he’s trashing it all,” said Jerry Coyne, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago. “It’s crazy.” Dr. Coyne was one of more than 150 scientists who signed four letters published last spring in the journal Nature criticizing a 2010 paper by Dr. Wilson, written with the mathematicians Martin A. Nowak and Corina E. Tarnita, outlining his group-selection arguments.

This morning I looked again at my well-worn copy of Sociobiology, which I bought in the year of publication, and I still think it’s a magnificent and influential achievement.  While Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, used some of the same arguments, Dawkins’s purpose was to show that a gene-centered view of evolution helps bring great clarity to the process of natural selection, while Wilson’s purpose in Sociobiology was to show how the principles of evolutionary genetics (including but not limited to inclusive fitness) bring great clarity to understanding the evolution of social behavior in animals. In that he succeeded magnificently, influencing the entire study of animal behavior and founding a new field whose name has morphed to “evolutionary psychology.”

Although Wilson got a lot of flak for his last chapter of Sociobiology, in which he extended the evolutionary principles of social behavior to humans, I don’t think the last chapter was too bad, and didn’t seriously mar a wonderful book.  Despite its occasional overreaching, the evolutionary study of human behavior has brought deep insights.  We are, after all, evolved mammals—it’s just that the fact we have culture, and that we can’t be experimentally manipulated, makes us hard to study. I didn’t like On Human Nature as much, as I think it was too overreaching and not as well written.

At any rate, Wilson’s dismissal of inclusive fitness is wrong. That brand of fitness is obviously important, as parental care, weaning conflict, and sibling rivalry (ubiquitous phenomena in animals) clearly demonstrate.  It’s a pity Wilson is trying to dismiss all this at the end of his career. But though I’ll fight his misguided ideas tooth and nail, I wish him well, for I like the man. I was his teaching assistant at Harvard, and in fact he helped get me into Harvard for graduate school.

Scheussler’s article has two other statements by Wilson. This one I like:

Not that he shies away from alienating potential allies. Religious readers, for example, may not take kindly to a chapter in the new book depicting religion as an archaic “trap” kept alive today by “purveyors of theological narcissism,” from the pope to the Dalai Lama.

“We’ve been spinning our wheels trying to talk about ways to bring the best of religion and science together,” he said in the interview, dismissing organized religion as fostering tribalism we no longer need.

This one I don’t like.  Although I dislike the term “scientism,” if ever it was instantiated by a statement, it’s in this view by Wilson:

And while some humanities scholars have embraced evolutionary ideas, many others will roll their eyes at his declaration, in a chapter on the arts, that the humanities will achieve a “full maturing” only when they take account of findings in cognitive science and genetics.

I’m not convinced that Beethoven, Tolstoy, or Joyce would have written appreciably better books or music had they had a deeper understanding of evolutionary biology.

Here’s my well-worn copy of Sociobiology. Inside I wrote my name and “September, 1975”: the year of publication:

Brother Blackford responds to me about free will

April 9, 2012 • 5:28 am

My friend Russell Blackford continues the back-and-forth we’ve had on the issue of free will in a new piece at  Talking Philosophy: “Jerry Coyne writes back—about free will.”  Because it’s Monday and I’m lazy and haven’t yet had coffee, let me just post his opening paragraph that gives all the relevant links:

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne recently wrote a post responding to my earlier post on his piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This debate can go back and forth a lot, but let me clarify a few things at least.

In private emails to me, Russell argues that I am “confused” on the issue, and perhaps I am.  But I have to say that I don’t find Russell’s piece bringing a lot of clarity to the issue, either.

For one thing, he seems to contradict himself.  On the issue of determinism, for instance, he says this:

. . . even if determinism is not true, there are well-known arguments as to why a mere mix of occasional indeterminism with determinism is unlikely to give us free will if we otherwise lack it (Jerry alludes to this in the Chronicle, and I agree with his brief comment on it). Moreover, even if determinism is not strictly true, it is difficult to see how I could be responsible for my own character, desires, etc., all the way down. Coming up with a picture of how this could work that is both coherent and plausible seems very difficult.

But he later argues that one can rightly blame someone for failing to save a drowning child.  Note the word “rightly,” which assumes not just responsibility (which is okay with me, as blame changes future behavior, both of the “blamee” and onlookers), but moral responsibility. Russell certainly favors the idea of moral responsibility. But if he sees difficulty in understanding how one can be responsible for one’s own character (and he’s right: how could we be?), then whence the concept of moral responsibility?

This highlights to me a problem with compatibilism: not a philosophical failure, but a tactical one. If most “compatibilists”—that is, those who, like Russell, find free will compatible with determinism—really are determinists, why do they soft-pedal this important result? After all, shouldn’t they be telling people that their actions are determined by the laws of physics, not their own “spooky will”?  Philosophers tend to de-emphaszie this important result—yes, a finding of science—in favor of showing us how we can haz free will after all.  I’m not sure why the soft-pedalling of determinism, but perhaps some philosophers resent the incursion of science onto their turf. (I know that is not true of Russell, though.)

But never mind.  Another problem is that Russell sort of agrees that he is a determinist, but doesn’t exactly trumpet that to the world:

Another point that should be made to try to get all this a bit clearer is that I am not especially reluctant to concede that causal determinism is true to whatever extent is required for arguments based on it to go through (assuming the arguments have no other problems). So Jerry misreads me when he thinks that I accept determinism “only grudgingly”. On the contrary, it would make the whole debate simpler for me if we knew that determinism is true. I’m not temperamentally opposed to determinism. Furthermore, I think that it’s probably true enough for our purposes.

That’s a lot of words to use for saying, “Yes, I accept determinism”!

But Russell, if you are a determinist, then why isn’t the whole debate simpler for you?  What else could there be but determinism of character and actions—physical determinism by genes and environment, with perhaps a soupçon of quantum indeterminacy, which Russell agrees does not count toward “free will”?  The fact that the debate has not become simpler for Russell is seen in his repeated statement that the “free will” case is complicated and fuzzy.

And if Russell is a determinist, why does he begin his last paragraph with this:

Perhaps we don’t have free will. Although there are no spooky forces controlling us, someone might argue that, for example, we all have deeply disordant sub-conscious urges which play much the same role.

No, those discordant subconscious urges cannot play the same role as a “soul,” because, unlike a soul, those urges have a material origin, and are hence part of the field of determinism that regulates our actions. They might be “spooky” because we don’t grasp them consciously, but subsconscious urges are not part of dualism.

But these are ancillary issues.  Russell’s real beef with my argument against free will turns on the use of the words “can” or “could.”  My definition of free will was this: if one replays the tape of one’s life back to the moment of a decision, with all the molecules and forces that acted previously still in play in an identical way, then “free will” is the notion that, given this situation, one could have made a different decision. Now most compatibilists, at least on this site, agree that it would indeed be impossible to have made a different decision.  Russell is explicit on this point: if everything is the same on the replay, then only one decision was possible.  But he takes issue with the word “could.”  My definition of it in this context was “it was actually possible, not just logically possible” to make a different decision. Russell’s definition of “could have decided otherwise” is that “to an outside observer, you apparently had all the mental and physical equipment necessary for making an alternative decision.”

Re the drowning child, for instance, Russell says this:

I did, however, use the scenario of the drowning child to demonstrate how we ordinarily use such words as “can” (“can’t”, “could”, etc.). Let’s return to that.

Perhaps Jerry wants to use the word “can” in a special sense, but if so the word becomes equivocal in its meaning. Normally, when we say, “I can save the child” or “I could have saved the child” we mean something slightly (but not very) vague to the effect that I have whatever cognitive and physical capacities are needed, have whatever equipment is required, am on the spot, and so on. Perhaps it includes not being in the grip of a disabling phobia and not being coerced by someone with a gun. “Can” refers to a commonsensical notion – slightly vague, but no more so than most ordinary language – of having the ability to do something.

If all this applies, but I fail to save the child (perhaps because I dislike children or because I don’t want to get wet, or because I am just too lazy), it makes still makes sense to say that (speaking tenselessly) I can save the child but I don’t do so because I don’t want to. Here, the ordinary meaning of “can” is being applied correctly to the situation. If Jerry’s argument demands throwing out this ordinary usage, it’s in all sorts of trouble. If he wants to use “can” and “could” in some other sense, apart from the ordinary one, in the context of free will talk, I see no reason to believe that his conception of free will is much like what the folk have in mind when they say, for example, “Russell acted of his own free will.” The empirical research done to date, e.g. by Eddy Nahmias and his colleagues, does not suggest that the folk, or the majority of them, have some special meaning of “can”, “could”, and “ability to act” in their minds.

In other words, you have free will because you “could have saved the child,” although in reality there was no possibility that you really would save the child.  You could have because you apparently possessed the cognitive and physical capacities to do so, even if it was impossible for you to exercise them.

I don’t see how this solves the problem.  For one thing, where is the “freedom” here? There isn’t any: you still have only one course of action. The “freedom” is purely theoretical! More important, what does Russell really mean by “cognitive and physical capacities to save a child”? He rules out some aspects of cognition as part of the “could” here:

Perhaps it includes not being in the grip of a disabling phobia and not being coerced by someone with a gun.

Well, perhaps Charles Whitman didn’t have free will when he shot all those students in Texas because it was found, post mortem, that he had a brain tumor that could have produced a murderous aggression.  So Whitman “couldn’t have” refrained from killing people.

But what is the difference between such a “disabling phobia” and the so-called “normal” neurological conditions that produce our behavior? Does someone who was repeatedly beaten and mistreated as a child have “free will” when he beats up someone else when he’s older? There are all sorts of environmental influences that can act deterministically (now or later in life) to produce a behavior—a behavior that was inevitable.  What is the difference between these and a “disabling phobia”?  Which phobias are “disabling” and which not—in other words, which neurological conditions show that one didn’t have free will and which truly instantiate free will? I see no relevant difference between Whitman’s brain tumor and a childhood trauma.  They are both forms of “coercion” that are equally potent (but not nearly as obvious) as a gun pointed to one’s head.  At what point does a “could not” become a “did not want to”? Does it lie between a tumor and a personality disorder?

(Let me hasten to add that I feel it is proper to remonstrate someone for failing to save a drowning child, for such remonstrations act to change behavior, and can lead to a better society.  I just don’t think that such a person was “morally responsible” for that failure to act.)

Russell thinks that his conception of free will is better because it involves a use of the word “could” that is in more in line with our everyday parlance.  When we say “I could have had a V8,” for instance, Russell thinks we mean, “There was V8 juice available and I didn’t have any mental disability that prevented me from ordering one, nor an inborn aversion to tomato juice.”  Well, if all he means by “free will” is that to an outsider one seems equipped to make a choice (but which outsider? can the outsider see our neurons and how they operate?), perhaps I’ll go along with that.  But not necessarily.

For there are other uses of the word “can and “could” that imply not just physical equipment, but the concept of want.  Here are two. What do you you think when you hear these phrases?

“Hey, buddy, my car’s broken down—could you give me a lift?”

“I’m hungry.  Can you give me a dollar for some food?”

According to Russell, in both cases you can tell the supplicant that yes, you could give him a lift or a dollar, but then walk away.  After all, you were equipped to give a ride or a dollar (you “could have”), but according to Russell you just didn’t want to.  But try telling that to those people.  “Yes, buddy, I can give you a dollar.  But I won’t.”  I doubt that either supplicant would comprehend these meanings.  In these cases the common understanding of “could” is precisely what I mean in my definition of free will.

The point is that there is often no clear distinction between “could have done” and “want to do”; indeed, under determinism I see no sensible difference between these concepts. But even in common parlance these two concepts elide.  I think the onus is on Russell here to show how one can be “physically and neurologically equipped” to perform an act in all ways, but then not perform that act.  If “free will” simply means that there is no reason obvious to an observer that one couldn’t perform an act, even though the character and constitution of the actor make it impossible for him to perform that action, then I see us mired in some sort of Free Will Wonderland.  After all, an outside observer (unless she’s a neuropsychologist two centuries from now) will never have the ability to examine the molecular structure of our bodies and the neuronal connections that will enable her to see whether we’re mentally equipped to do something.

Mike Wallace dies at 93

April 8, 2012 • 10:39 am

Besides the NBC Nightly News, the only t.v. show I watch regularly is 60 Minutes, and I’ve watched it for decades.  The show recently lost Andy Rooney, and I’m sad to report that a founding member, Mike Wallace, died yesterday at 93.  He had been with the show for forty years, and I watched him engage in lots of hard-hitting journalism.  Wallace asked questions that nobody else dared, and won more than 20 Emmy Awards. The CBS website reports:

Each week, “60 Minutes” viewers could expect the master interviewer to ask the questions they wanted answered by the world’s leaders and headliners. Wallace did not disappoint them, often revealing more than the public ever hoped to see. He got the stoic Ayatollah Khomeini to smile during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 when he asked him what he thought about being called “a lunatic” by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The Ayatollah answered by correctly predicting that Sadat would be assassinated.

Well, besides Rooney and Wallace the show also lost favorites Harry Reasoner and Ed Bradley—who always reminded me of my dad—but we still have Morley Safer (who was also Jewish but didn’t change his name—Wallace’s real first name was “Myron”).

A new poll on the politics, religiosity, and well being of Americans

April 8, 2012 • 9:47 am

There’s a new Gallup poll on religiosity, politics, and “well being” in America that, at least for religion, gives some surprising and some unsurprising results.

The unsurprising ones are that the five most religious states in the U.S.—with “religious” meaning “containing the highest proportion of individuals who are very religious” (i.e., those who consider religion an important part of their daily lives and who go to church once a week or almost once a week)—are Mississippi (59%), Utah (57%; Mormons, remember), Alabama (56%), Louisiana (54%), and Arkansas (54%).  In fact, it’s no surprise that all of the “top” ten states are in the south save Utah and Oklahoma, which, as Abbie Smith will attest, may as well be in the south.

It’s also no surprise that the least religious states are in New England, with the proportion of “very religious” being 23% in New Hampshire and Vermont, 25% in Maine, and 28% in Massachusetts.  Here’s the map (click to enlarge):

What did surprise me was the 32% of Americans who see themselves as “nonreligious”:

Gallup classifies 40% of Americans nationwide as very religious — based on their statement that religion is an important part of their daily life and that they attend religious services every week or almost every week. Another 32% of Americans are nonreligious, based on their statement that religion is not an important part of their daily life and that they seldom or never attend religious services. The remaining 28% of Americans are moderately religious, because they say religion is important but that they do not attend services regularly or because they say religion is not important but still attend services.

Since roughly 10% of Americans don’t believe in God, and only about 1.5% go so far as to describe themselves as “atheists” or “agnostics,” I wonder how many of these 32% of “nonreligious” Americans are secret atheists who just don’t like the label, or are unwilling to confess to an interviewer that—horrors!—they don’t believe in God.  But before we get all excited about the growing number of nonbelievers, these data don’t square at all with Gallup’s own polls on similar issues taken over the last five years:

19% is a long way from 32%, and I’m at a loss to explain this disparity.

You can also see some “state of the states” maps from 2009-2011  giving the political leanings of Americans as well as their sense of well being.  You can look at these latter two maps over three years by clicking a button, and it’s interesting to see how much more Republican the U.S. has become since 2009.  Here’s the Republican map for 2011:

No surprise here: religious states tend to be Republican states, though there are some notable exceptions (e.g., Wyoming and Colorado are Republican but nonreligious).

And finally, there are three years’ of maps for “well being” divided by state, with that index subsuming (I think) factors like health, optimism, obesity, insurance coverage, and the like.  Here’s the map for 2011:

What’s striking about this map is that I see only one state—Utah—which is both highly religious and whose inhabitants have high “well being”.   That goes along with the theory that low well being is correlated with high religiosity, but some alert and ambitious reader might want to do a formal correlation between the figures from the Gallup poll.  If you’re into post facto rationalization, Utah makes sense because its inhabitants are Mormons, who tend to be very well off compared to other religious Americans.

h/t: Ant

Shapiro’s anti-Darwinian book gets panned

April 8, 2012 • 5:15 am

By way of introducing today’s post, I’ll put above the fold a comment I got last night from a reader:

themayan commented on Jim Shapiro continues his misguided attack on neo-Darwinism

Lets stop the BS! The Neo-Darwinian synthesis/ the modern synthesis is dead and has been dead for a long time. It’s an out dated theory which has which has ran its course and found lacking in light of 21st century data. He are holding up a rotting corpse of a theory which is reminiscent of the movie A Weekend at Bernies. I say hooray for Shapiro and other dissenters who are stirring the waters and forcing people to either put up or shut up, or unfortunately in Coynes case, attack the messenger. I’m with Suzan Mazur on this one when she broke the story on the Altenberg 16 summit a few years ago and when she asked the question “Will the Real Theory of Evolution Please Stand up?”

Why are comments like this invariably accompanied by bad spelling, grammar and punctuation?  More important, they’re never accompanied by evidence.  Why, exactly, is neo-Darwinism dead? What is wrong with the idea that randomly produced genetic variation, fuelling the processes of natural selection and genetic drift, is responsible for both the diversity of life and (in the case of natural selection) the remarkable “design” of creatures that used to be imputed to God? (Suzan Mazur, by the way, is a gonzo journalist who has spent an unsuccessful career trying to attack neo-Darwinism on obscure websites. You can find one example here.)

At any rate, this is germane to the discussion we’ve been having about biologist James Shapiro’s attacks on neo-Darwinism in HuffPo (Shapiro works here at the University of Chicago). In February I did a post on Shapiro’s new book, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. I didn’t read the book, but simply criticized a HuffPo piece that Shapiro wrote summarizing his thesis, which was that modern discoveries about cell biology showed that two tenets of modern evolutionary theory—gradualism and the efficacy of natural selection as the cause of adaptive “design”—were wrong. He responded in a comment on my website, and also in a defensive column at HuffPo. Yesterday I pointed out what was wrong with Shapiro’s response.

Now Anthony M. Dean, who works on the molecular evolution of microbes at the University of Minnesota, has bitten the bullet, read Shapiro’s book, and reviewed it in the latest issue of Microbe. I admit to a frisson of pleasure in seeing that Dean’s critique of Shapiro is nearly identical to mine, and in noting that, unlike Shapiro, Dean doesn’t see the edifice of modern evolutionary theory as about to crumble. I excerpt Dean’s take on Shapiro’s anti-Darwinian claims, which may be of interest mainly to readers who study evolution:

It is one thing to establish that certain cellular subsystems do not conform to received dogma. It is quite another to establish that a paradigm shift in thinking is necessary. Every evolutionary biologist knows the field is littered with the corpses of those who once heralded the arrival of the next Kuhnian Messiah. At the end of Part II Shapiro too has failed to convince that the many fascinating molecular phenomena he describes requires a wholesale jettisoning of Darwinian doctrine. Indeed, throwing out basic Darwinian principles (random mutation, heritable variation, and the sieve of natural selection) would seem folly, as they surely predate the evolution of such highly evolved nonconformist subsystems as CRISPR-Cas.

In Part III Shapiro seriously overreaches. He argues that horizontal gene transfer, symbiogenesis, whole genome doubling, and the modular and duplicative nature of protein evolution are non-Darwinian because they do not conform to strict vertical inheritance and Darwin’s advocacy of “numerous, successive, slight variations.” Shapiro asserts “The data are overwhelmingly in favor of the saltationist school that postulated major genomic changes at key moments in evolution . . . Only by restricting their analyses to certain classes of genomic DNA, such as homologous protein coding sequences, can conventional evolutionists apply their gradualist models.”

His stance is patently unfair. Thomas Huxley famously criticized Darwin for championing too gradualist a view of phenotypic evolution. Today’s Darwinists accept Huxley’s criticism. Many evolutionary studies focus on gradually evolving homologous coding sequences precisely because these are best for establishing phylogenetic relationships among species-a matter of some importance to biologists. Horizontal gene transfer, symbiotic genome fusions, massive genome restructuring (to remarkably little phenotypic effect in day lilies and muntjac deer), and dramatic phenotypic changes based on only a few amino acid replacements are just some of the supposedly non-Darwinian phenomena routinely studied by Darwinists. Shapiro’s implication that gene duplication and functional divergence is somehow non-Darwinian is also wrong. New uses for old parts has long been a staple of the Darwinian diet. In a spectacular example of cognitive dissonance Shapiro first describes, with fanfare, how Woese identified the Archaea as a distinct group of prokaryotes using phylogenetic analyses of rRNA sequences-analyses that assume “the slow accumulation of random gradual changes transmitted by restricted patterns of vertical descent”—only to later assert that “The DNA record definitely does not support the slow accumulation of random gradual changes transmitted by restricted patterns of vertical descent.”

If, as Shapiro argued in his HuffPo response, I “misunderstood [his] point completely,” then I guess Dean did, too.  My rule is that when two or more biologists independently tell you the same problem with your idea or experiment, you should pay more than twice the attention that you do to a single critic.

h/t: Eli

Happy Easter: Good luck, and thanks for all the Peeps®

April 8, 2012 • 5:04 am

I have to confess that one of my all-time favorite confections is Marshmallow Peeps®. On the week after Easter, I find my departmental mailbox overflowing with boxes of Peeps, purchased by penurious but kindly friends who take advantage of the fact that all Easter candy goes on sale for half price the Monday after the holiday.  For those of you in countries unlucky enough to lack these sugar-crusted blobs of chicken-shaped marshmallow (that means all nations outside the U.S. and Canada), here’s what they look like:

Peeps are made by the Just Born candy company of Bethelehem, Pennsylvania, who took over the manufacture of the chicken-shaped confections from another company in 1953.  They’re are an American tradition, and can be microwaved, made into LOLzy dioramas (see this year’s Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest, or used in games.  I prefer mine slightly stale, so I slit open the cellophane and let them dry for a day or so before consumption. This produces a slight but satisfying “crunch” when you bite into them.  A while back the company got the bright idea of producing Peeps® for holidays other than Easter, so now you can get Christmas-tree-shaped Peeps® in December, orange pumpkin-shaped Peeps® at Halloween, and so on.

Here’s a gentleman producing a world record for the speedy consumption of Peeps®.

The eater is Patrick “Deep Dish” Bertoletti, a professional eater specializing in breaking world records.

Like sausages and politics, it’s best not to know how Peeps® are made.  The company has official videos of their manufacture, but they cleverly ignore the way the actual marshmallow forms are produced. (Some non-official photos are here.)

And they’re durable.  Wikipedia notes this:

Peeps are sometimes jokingly described as “indestructible”. In 1999, scientists at Emory University performed experiments on batches of Peeps to see how easily they could be dissolved, burned or otherwise disintegrated, using such agents as cigarette smoke, boiling water and liquid nitrogen.  They claimed that the eyes of the confectionery “wouldn’t dissolve in anything”. Furthermore, Peeps are insoluble in acetone, water, diluted sulfuric acid, and sodium hydroxide. Concentrated sulfuric acid seems to have effects similar to the expected effects of sulfuric acid on sugar.

For more on Peeps® recipes (I like to float one in coffee), ways to torture them, and miscellaneous links, go here.  And weigh in if you have guilty food pleasures like Peeps.

As for the “good luck” part, here’s a church sign I found on Facebook:

Cat opens freezer door, steals food

April 7, 2012 • 10:16 am

Okay, I couldn’t resist this, both for the cute kid and the crafty Oscar, a cat who has learned to open the freezer and steal—what else?—frozen fish sticks.

—>Video here<—

Special bonus video

A screenshot:

This behavior might have begun, as many such behaviors do, as the fortuitous result of another behavior, but it’s clearly purposeful now. Look at how Oscar uses his right rear paw to push off from the refrigerator door, giving him the leverage to open the freezer.

Did Moses stutter? A scientific investigation

April 7, 2012 • 9:25 am

This is absolutely unbelievable.  There’s a new paper in Neurological Science, by three neurological scientists, analyzing the age-old question of whether Moses stuttered!  The abstract says it all:

Abstract Stuttering is a disturbance of normal fluency of speech whose pathophysiology is still not well understood. We investigated one of the most ancient speech disorders in the biblical person Moses who lived in approximately 1300 BC. To get the most complete medical and nonmedical information on Moses, we did systematic searches in the Holy Bible using the Bible-Discovery v2.3 software (http://www.bible-discovery.com) looking for verses containing the terms “Moses”, “Stuttering” and “Stutter”; and in PubMed/Medline database for manuscripts having the terms “Moses”, “Bible” and “Stuttering”. From the Bible search, 742 verses were found, of which 23 were relevant; three additional verses were found by hand search. Six papers discussing Moses’s pathology were found in the PubMed search. The analysis of ancient descriptions in the light of current research suggests that stuttering is the most likely pathology Moses had, with clear evidence for both genetic origin and environmental triggers. Further, it was found that Moses practiced some “sensory tricks” that could be used to relieve his speech disorder which are, to our knowledge, the first “tricks” that successfully modulated a movement disorder described in the medical literature.

The case of Moses is presented as if he’s a medical patient.  Are the authors aware of the humor in this?

Patient and methods
The patient was Moses ( מרשת o´ משת ), which means “saved from the waters”. According to Exodus 6:20, Amram married his aunt Jochebed, who gave birth to Moses. When he was born, Pharaoh ordered to kill every boy who had a Jewish mother (Exodus 1:15–22).

Here’s some of the evidence that Moses stuttered:

The biblical descriptions commenting on the speech disorder of Moses suggested that it started at an early age. In fact, when Moses refused to speak out in Exodus 4:10 he said “neither before, nor since you have spoken to your servant”. This statement supports the view that Moses had developmental stuttering, the onset of which is between 3 and 8 years [44]. Interestingly, 26% of children with such disorder recover before puberty, while it persists more in boys [34, 45]. Several associated signs and symptoms present in clinically established stuttering are found in Moses’s descriptions including fear declared in Exodus 6:30 when he talked to the Pharaoh, the presence of a spokesman described in Exodus 4:13–16, and negation, hesitation and avoidance secondary to God’s orders described in Exodus 4:10 and 6:12.

A genetic abnormality, as the one attributed to Moses, associated with environmental stressors including new home, social pressure and/or negative experiences at early ages would favor the persistence of the speech disorder in his adult age [46].

And what “tricks” did the patriarch use?  It really pains me to have to reproduce this for you:

At this point, it must be remarked that Moses used at least two “sensory trick” strategies that would help to modulate his speech motor program abnormalities. The first “trick” was the “rod of God” prescribed by God himself and emphasized in several passages of the Bible including Exodus 4:17 and Numbers 20:9. The second “trick” used by Moses was singing, a method used for enhancing speech fluency in stutterers [36, 60]. It should be remarked that the first time that the verb “sing” is conjugated in the Bible is in Exodus 15:1 when Moses sang. After this, Deuteronomy 31:30 and 32:44 stated that Moses sang a song in front of the crowd, without any language abnormality. Moreover, Psalm 91, one of the most famous songs of the Bible, was authored by Moses.

From all of the above, it is rational to propose that both the use of the rod and singing were not only instruments for performing divine signals and guide Jewish people, but also were actual “therapies” that helped in modulating the desynchronized sensory and motor programming of Moses, improving his speech fluency. Accordingly, such “sensory tricks” would be the first neurorehabilitation measures described to date in medical literature [61, 62], employed to modulate a movement disorder.

Okay, this is shameful and embarrassing, both for the three authors and the scientific community at large. It is not, I emphasize, an April Fool’s joke. It is three scientists investigating a dubious disorder in a fictional person.  Regardless of the arguments about the historical Jesus, there’s not a scintilla of evidence that Moses existed, much less that the events of the Exodus occurred (they didn’t—the evidence is against them).  So why is this in a scientific journal? Should we expect the Journal of Herpetology to speculate about what kind of reptile talked to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden?  Can we expect a paper in the Journal of Gerontology about the remarkable longevity of Methuselah? What herbs did he eat that allowed him to attain the age of 969? What these three deeply misguided authors have done is, in fact, produce a form of literary criticism masquerading as science.

Maybe someday these dudes will learn that you have to look for evidence beyond the Bible if you’re trying to justify something in the Bible as a historical fact.  They could start with trying to figure out whether Moses really existed. They didn’t; they just just assume he did.

What a bunch of morons.  And this, by the way, isn’t the only paper on Moses’s stuttering in the scientific literature.  There are at least five others.

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Leon-Sarmiento, F. E., E. Paez, and M. Hallett. 2012. Nature and nurture in stuttering: a systematic review of the case of Moses. Neurological Science DOI 10.1007/s10072-012-0984-2