HuffPo “science”

February 2, 2012 • 8:00 am

As I predicted, the new “science” section of HuffPo has turned out to be almost a tabloid-like selection of puff pieces and soft science.  I’m disappointed but not surprised. Here’s a screenshot of its latest headlines (click to enlarge):

Note Christopher Lane’s piece at the left: it’s about agnosticism, Hitchens, and Dawkins, and has virtually nothing to do with science. Rather, it’s a defense of agnosticism as the “reasonable” position on faith, much as we heard recently vis-a-vis David Attenborough.  It’s laughable how Lane uses weak evidence to show that Hitchens was much more approving of agnosticism than was Dawkins.

. . . one might assume Hitchens would’ve been similarly uncompromising about agnosticism as failing to reach his own level of certainty in “antitheism,” his preferred self-description. Yet, of the seven brief references to agnosticism that appear in “God Is Not Great,” all are unmistakably supportive. What’s more, Hitchens’s book did something increasingly rare among atheists and critics of religion: whenever possible, it grouped agnostics with atheists and freethinkers, as allies with shared arguments against monotheism, zealotry and fundamentalism.

In “Putting It Mildly,” his opening chapter, Hitchens wrote: “Not all can be agreed on matters of aesthetics, but we secular humanists and atheists and agnostics do not wish to deprive humanity of its wonders or consolations. Not in the least.” Among other things, the sentence abounds in inclusiveness: “we secular humanists and atheists and agnostics…”

A later chapter reinforces the point when Hitchens discusses “American freethinkers and agnostics and atheists” with almost ostentatious use of the connective “and.”

Yeah, it abounds in inclusiveness!  And the word “and” is so meaningful here!

Another gem from the column:

For Dawkins, all the same, agnosticism’s embrace of a similar unknown [the existence of God] points not to its stringency or capaciousness, but to its “poverty.” “I am agnostic,” he later quips, “to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.” At such moments, the vast, considered history of agnosticism slips into caricature. The dignity and candor of honest disbelief morph into the cop-out of weak tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitting. We are left with playground taunts, where rigorous skeptics are mocked as namby-pamby while unbelievers crown themselves “brights.” (Hitchens, of course, winced over such regrettable moves.)

Still, when doubt is acknowledged, even embraced, it sharpens conviction, strengthens resilience and modulates extremism — among other ways by testing beliefs and asking us to consider in what they really consist. Agnosticism also makes it possible for people to change their minds, a prime element in the rise of secularism and freethought, as I detail in “The Age of Doubt.” When a culture is polarized over such matters, however, it tends to shun the possibility of moderation through religious and intellectual doubt. And though in doing so it seems to gain an illusion of certainty, in the frequent flight to extremes it risks losing the considered center. There, where freethought inevitably meets agnosticism and atheism, shades of gray are unavoidable — and sometimes even welcome.

Curiously, when it comes to considering those who are entrenched and thus unable to change their minds, it is the atheists who are chastised, not those who are certain that there is God, Mohamed, or Baby Jesus.

Dawkins on Nick Cohen, Salman Rushdie, free speech, and the Jaipur literary festival

February 2, 2012 • 6:07 am

When four readers (and also Richard himself) send me a link to a new Dawkins essay, I will certainly pay attention.  And you should, too, for Richard has written a nice new piece for his own website, “‘It’s part of their culture’: reading Nick Cohen in the light of the Jaipur affair.”

The “Jaipur affair,” of course, is the Jaipur Literature Festival, held annually in the state of Rajasthan in India—this year between January 20 and 24.  Salman Rushdie’s scheduled appearance there was cancelled after there were death threats made on the basis of his 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, which of course incited rancor throughout the Muslim world, led to a fatwa against Rushdie, and forced him to go into hiding. Many who criticized the book, and still do, have never read it.  And Satanic Verses is still banned in India, which is supposedly a secular democracy. (You can sign a petititon to rescind the ban here.)

“Reading Nick Cohen” refers to Cohen’s new book, You Can’t Read This Book, which decries censorship in the modern world. Richard refers to it throughout his piece.

Indian officials behaved execrably about Rusdhie’s participation.  Indeed, the Rajasthani police may have been complicit in publicizing threats so that he wouldn’t appear.  Festival organizers even prohibited a video link that would allow Rushdie to speak at the Festival. And, according to Wikipedia,

Meanwhile, police seek Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar who have fled Jaipur on the advice of officials at the Jaipur Literature Festival after reading excerpts from The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India. Kunzru later wrote, “Our intention was not to offend anyone’s religious sensibilities, but to give a voice to a writer who had been silenced by a death threat”.

Yes, the lawbreakers aren’t those who made the death threats, or the police who were complicit in the publicity, but the people who read from Rushdie’s book.

The Chairman of the Press Council of India and former judge of the Supreme Court Markandey Katju said that although he was “not in favour of religious obscurantism“, he found Rushdie a “poor” and “substandard writer” and the focus on him detracting from more fundamental issues of “colonial inferiority complex” among educated Indians and what a literary mission could be about.

The government of India, of course, wants those Muslim votes: there are 150 million adherents to that faith in India, making the country second only to Indonesia in number of Muslim inhabitants.

At any rate, read Richard’s piece and watch at least the first video below. It includes a statement that Richard reprises in the essay:

Our whole society is soft on religion. The assumption is remarkably widespread that religious sensitivities are somehow especially deserving of consideration – a consideration not accorded to ordinary prejudice. . . I admit to being offended by Father Christmas, ‘Baby Jesus’, and Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, but if I tried to act on these prejudices I’d quite rightly be held accountable. I’d be challenged to justify myself. But let somebody’s *religion* be offended and it’s another matter entirely. Not only do the affronted themselves kick up an almighty fuss; they are abetted and encouraged by influential figures from other religions and the liberal establishment. Far from being challenged to justify their beliefs like anybody else, the religious are granted sanctuary in a sort of intellectual no go area.

He makes explicit some of the motivations behind Rushdie’s ban, concluding that much of that sentiment derived from thought like this:

I shall give in to you because I know that freedom of speech is not part of your culture. Who am I to impose Western, colonialist, paternalistic ideas like freedom of speech on your very different and equally valuable culture? Of course your ‘hurt’ and ‘offence’ should take precedence over our purely Western preoccupation with freedom of speech, and of course we’ll cancel the video link.

And Dawkins quotes Richard Hughes (in Cohen’s book): “Oppression is what we do in the West. What they do in the Middle East is ‘their culture’.”  Dawkins’s essay is short but trenchant, and will infurate you about the double standard of Western “liberals” when it comes to free expression in places like India.

Free speech cannot be subject to cultural relativism. It may be illegal or dangerous to voice unpopular sentiments in places like India (or Austria, France and Germany—among the 16 Western nations where Holocaust denial is banned), but it is wicked to defend the suppression of speech anywhere.

***

Here’s a five-minute video of Richard’s statement of support of Rushdie at the Festival:

And here’s a video of a Q&A session with Dawkins at the festival (16 minutes):

Eric MacDonald: why not be strident?

February 1, 2012 • 10:20 am

Over at Choice in Dying, Eric has a marvelous post about the Daily Mail’s use of David Attenborough’s agnosticism to show that New Atheism is on the wane. Eric’s piece, “Let’s keep new atheism strident,” is longish, as is his wont, but thoughtful and beautifully written, as is also his wont. And . . . it is far more strident than usual, as if Eric wanted to demonstrate how we should write and behave. It really is, I think, one of the best posts he’s ever done. I won’t spoil it by giving lengthy excerpts, but here’s one, relevant to a post I put up earlier this morning:

The pope and many other Christians, of course, don’t really believe in evolution at all, because they believe that, at some point in the development of life, god directly intervened and created a being with a soul, namely, us. This ontological saltation, of course, is not a part of the theory, but an addition that simply makes a nonsense of the theory. In order to create intelligent, rational beings, who had a ghostly kind of free will, god had to intervene directly in the process, and, as a result, an entirely new order of being was created. This is not supported by the scientific evidence. It is a theological presupposition — made up stuff! The evidence is quite clear. Human beings are animals, like all the other animals on earth, and like them, human beings are related to all of life, including plants and bacteria, amoebae, and even more primitive forms of life. There is no ontological jump from animals to human beings. Given the theory of evolution, there is simply no reason to believe such a thing. We can trace our lineage back to a common ancestor of gorillas and chimps, and further back to the beginning of life, to one-celled creatures just beginning their billions of years’ long journey to the amazing diversity we see in the world around us, including ourselves.

Even on this theological supposition, what are we to do with the billions of years of suffering of so many animals that have come to be and then lost the evolutionary fight, and were replaced by more successful forms of life? Billions of years of meaningless, pointless suffering, with no one around to respond with awe and wonder, as human beings can. It is simply intolerable to believe that there is a god who used this method for creating us, for bringing us into being. It is a completely mechanistic, algorithmic process, set in motion billions of years ago, and just by chance, happened upon beings like us who can think about the universe and our surroundings, and find it full of things at which we can wonder, and consider with awe. The entire reason for the stridency of the new atheism lies right there. There is no reason to believe a god necessary for the production of this evolutionary process, and any god that was responsible for it would have to be a monster.

A British journalist gets it all wrong when explaining why Americans reject evolution

February 1, 2012 • 6:01 am

Accommodationists have the most amazing ability to ignore the elephant in the room when discussing why America, uniquely among First World nations, largely rejects evolution.  That elephant is, of course, religion.  How many creationists, or opponents of evolution, aren’t motivated by their faith? Yes, there are a few, but you’d have to be completely blinkered not to see that America’s rejection of evolution is due largely to America’s extreme religiosity (also unique among First World nations).

One of the blinkered is British journalist Dennis Sewell. His new piece in the CatholicHerald.co.uk, “Jon Huntsman was crazy to back evolution,” explains why Republican politicians won’t embrace evolution.  Unfortunately, Sewell blames everything but religion for that behavior.

Well, he’s right about one thing: the Republican fear of Darwin:

On a Thursday afternoon last August Jon Huntsman, then a candidate for the Republican nomination in the US presidential race, used Twitter to send the shortest political suicide note in history: “I believe in evolution… Call me crazy.”

I call him crazy. Had the man done no message research? This single tweet did more even than Huntsman’s decision to pose for Annie Leibovitz in Vogue to confirm that the candidate was out of touch – not only with popular opinion in the small towns that Sarah Palin likes to call “real America”, but also with a philosophical anxiety that pervades the United States, from sea to shining sea.

(Note the term “philosophical” anxiety, not “religously-based anxiety.”)  And Sewell’s also correct about the dismal statistics on American acceptance of evolution, though he gets in a gratuitous swipe at Richard Dawkins and his ” smart alec” acolytes:

Smart alec acolytes of Richard Dawkins, who like to style themselves “Brights”, while dismissing anyone who questions their materialist outlook as intellectually deficient, will be peeved to discover that only one in four American voters who have been awarded Masters degrees accepts the Darwinian line on evolution. Indeed, Gallup found that scientific orthodoxy on this topic is a minority position at every level of education – from high school dropout to PhD – and in every category of political affiliation. Despite the barrage of publicity that attended the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species in 2009, the latest Gallup figures show that overall only 16 per cent of Americans today believe what they were taught about evolution in science classes at school. Consequently, any politician, of whatever stripe, who unambiguously sides with science on this issue puts him or herself at odds with the majority of voters.

(Really, does anyone us the term “Brights” any more?)

Don’t you sense here a bit of evolution-dissing here? More about that in a minute.  Yes, the Gallup Poll shows that only 16% of Americans accept evolution (at least in humans) as scientists do: an unguided, materialistic process of which humans were one of millions of products.  More Americans—38%—think that God guided the evolution of humans, but that’s a form of theistic evolution which, as Eric MacDonald argues in a new post, is simply a form of creationism, with humans reflecting God’s intercession in evolution. And 40% of Americans still believe in the Biblical view that humans were created instantly.

To what does Sewell attribute this problem?  Not religion, although he mentions it tangentially. Rather, he sees it as the result of two factors:

1.  Eugenics and evolution-inspired racism. Sewell says this:

The answer lies in the way evolution has evolved in the United States. It is not Darwin’s original scientific theory that so many sensible, well-educated Americans object to, but the ideological monstrosity that Darwinism has become over time. First, at the turn of the 20th century, scientists claimed that evolution had social implications. This found expression in Social Darwinism and eugenics, which saw the rural poor hunted across the Appalachians and young women forcibly sterilised for having children out of wedlock. Then came Scientific Racialism, which claimed that evolutionary science proved that America’s minorities – Blacks, Hispanics, Italians, Greeks and Jews – were biologically inferior to those of pure New England stock. Meanwhile, the Darwinists were asserting that evolution necessarily implied the triumph of philosophical materialism. Americans were told that the rights they held to be self-evident had no basis in reality at all and that a human life has no more intrinsic value than that of an insect.

Well, it’s questionable how much theories of evolution played into this racism, as opposed to the rise of genetics at the beginning of the 20th century.  Yes, that was a dire time for the misapplication of science (see Steve Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man), but I think that theories of genetics and of selective breeding  played far more of a role in eugenics than did evolution.  After all, natural selection was in low repute until about 1930, although artificial selection—the basis for eugenics—had been practiced for millennia without any knowledge of evolution.

But that’s beside the point. Does Sewell really think that Americans reject Darwinism because of its supposed connection with racism and eugenics? I doubt that most Americans even know much about that, and they’re also not aware that Darwin campaigned constantly against slavery, though he did of course have some dire views on racial superiority.  Sewell’s views here appear largely to derive from his book, The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics. which pins all sorts of racism and eugenic ideas on Darwin (see a critical review by Marek Kohn in The Independent here). Of course we can’t hold evolutionary biology responsible for how its ideas are misused, but neither can we impute Americans’ dislike of evolution to those misuses, about which Americans are largely ignorant.

2.  Scientism, evolutionary psychology and “pan-Darwinism.” Yes, the trouble’s also due to Dan Dennett and those evolutionary psychologists, who impute everything to evolution:

Evolution began as a neat explanation of variation within species and a plausible hypothesis for the origin of species. But today it is held out as a sufficient explanation of the origin of all life, a general explanatory theory of the development of everything – including culture – a grand narrative to end all grand narratives. Evolution is presented by Daniel Dennett as a “universal acid” that dissolves all ethical and moral systems, and by Richard Dawkins as a compelling argument against the existence of God and a slam-dunk case for abandoning any search for meaning, purpose or direction in human affairs.

Does anyone seriously expect the American public to buy into all that? Science has broken its bounds. Instead of confining evolution to the natural world, scientists have sought to intrude its application into the social, political, philosophical and religious domains. Denying evolution’s veracity is for many ordinary Americans a way of rejecting that. It is righteous cussedness.

Well of course evolution does have implications for sociology, politics, and even philosophy, if for no other reason than those are the products of evolved brains, and those areas may also evince phenomena that are the result of evolution (male-male competition, for instance). But again, that’s not the reason America rejects evolution.

As you know, I’m not a wholesale fan of evolutionary psychology, but the application of evolutionary biology to human and animal behavior has been very fruitful.  And yes, evolution is evidence against an important religious view: the design argument. Nor does the cruelty and waste of natural selection attest to the existence of a loving and benevolent God.

But that aside, the gist of Sewell’s article is that evolutionists themselves are to blame for America’s rejection of evolution.

That’s palpable nonsense.  Every statistic shows that evolution-denial is born of religion.  Religious people accept evolution far less than do secularists, and Biblical literalists far less than those who see the Bible as divinely inspired but not literally true.  Church attendance is strongly and negatively correlated with acceptance of evolution.  Countries that are less religious accept evolution far more readily.  And, of course, creationism has repeatedly been thrown out of America’s public schools by the courts because creationism is a belief based on religion, not fact.  Finally, and I’ve quoted this several times before, here’s an analysis of poll data by Dennis Masci writing for the Pew Forum:

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin’s theory.

So while Sewell is correct in claiming that Republicans see evolution as a hot potato, he’s simply wrong to blame that on American’s fear of eugenics and evolutionary psychology.  It’s palpably obvious that Republicans are pandering to Americans’ religiosity (much stronger among fellow Republicans than among Democrats), and their knowledge that religious folks, particularly conservative ones, who form much of the Republican base, see evolution as damaging to their faith and therefore destructive of meaning, purpose and morality.

I’ll have more to say about the influence of religion on American evolution-denial in a future article, but the connection is so obvious that you have to have some other agenda to deny it. One such agenda is accommodationism: the idea that we can’t criticize religion if we’re to convert the faithful to evolution.  I don’t know if that’s what is behind Sewell’s views, and I find it strange that a Brit, who lives in a country so much less religious than America, can’t descry the effect of our religion on our views about science.

But I found one telling remark in an interview with Sewell published in Time Magazine in 2009. Here’s his response to a question about the influence of Darwin.

All things considered, do you believe Darwin was a great luminary in the path of human progress?
What has the theory of evolution done for the practical benefit of humanity? It’s helped our understanding of ourselves, yet compared to, say, the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the World Wide Web, I wonder why Darwin occupies this position at the pinnacle of esteem. I can only imagine he has been put there by a vast public relations exercise.

Yep, forget about how Darwin’s work transformed our understanding not only of ourselves, but of nature and our own relationship to other living creatures in nature, or how it made instant sense of so many observations that puzzled Darwin’s predecessors. (We all know the famous quote of geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Noting in biology makes sense except in light of evolution”. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not far off.) No, to Sewell the influence of evolutionary biology reflects a vast public relations exercise engineered by self-aggrandizing scientists.

h/t: Dan Dennett

Kitteh contest: Kenny

February 1, 2012 • 5:00 am

Reader Abishek sends us a photo of his family’s fatigued felid:

This is Kenny. We (my wife and I) got him from the SPCA in 2005 when we were in graduate school. He’s generally an indoors cat but goes out on supervised outings two to three times a week in the garden area around our apartment complex. He is the darling of the neighborhood (all my neighbors know him by name) primarily because he runs up to people to greet them and sometimes plays fetch with his stuffed octopus toy. This picture was taken on the day of the DC snowstorm last winter; we had let him out in the snow for over an hour and he apparently got tired and was in the process of relaxing in front of the television, on a big round chair left over from our grad school days.

Do we need group selection to explain human cooperation?

January 31, 2012 • 11:15 am

Readers of this site will know that I’m not a big fan of group selection—the idea that adaptations in different species often result not from selection acting among individuals with different genetic constitutions, but from selection acting among groups, with some whole groups replacing others by virtue of their average genetic difference.

One supposedly group-selected trait is altruism, or any form of cooperation in which a “donor” of help receives little in return. In evolutionary terms, a genotype that sacrifices its fitness for a non-relative is at a disadvantage, and genes promoting such behaviors will be eliminated.  But if different groups had different proportions of altruists, then perhaps the altruist-rich groups would survive at the expense of groups containing more selfish members, and the altruistic trait could spread via this differential survival of groups.

Besides the lack of empirical evidence for such selection in nature, there are two theoretical problems. First, group proliferation and extinction is much slower than the reproduction of individuals within groups, so it’s hard to see how the former could outweigh the conflicting pressures of the latter.  Second, even if altruism is established via group selection, it’s vulnerable to the invasion of mutant individuals carrying non-altruistic genes: such “free riders” would be at an advantage within-all altruist groups. This would lead to the erosion of altruism, which would thus be unstable if it evolved through group selection.

Actually, pure altruism is exceedingly rare in nature, as we might expect if it’s subject to selection against individuals behaving that way. We do see it, though, in humans. Individuals regularly sacrifice their fitness (survival and reproduction) for unrelated individuals. Policeman and firemen, for example, do this, as do soldiers who risk their lives to save their comrades.

We don’t know whether such altruism in our own species has any genetic basis, but a new book review in Evolutionary Psychology by Michael Price of Brunel University, London, suggests that even if it does, one can account for it by selection on individuals rather than groups. Brunel is reviewing a new book by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution (Princeton University Press, 2011), and it’s one of those rare reviews that makes its own contribution to science, bringing together a lot of evidence—in this case against the book’s thesis that human cooperation, which includes altruistic acts, evolved by group selection. (The pdf of the review, by the way, is available free at the links above and below.)

If you’re not interested in the technicalities, you can skip this paragraph from Price’s review, but I like it because it’s a mini-review of the evidence that human cooperation shows all the evolutionary signs of having evolved by individual rather than group selection.  There are, of course, many evolutionary scenarios showing how cooperation and reciprocal altruism can evolve by individual selection alone, but Price summarizes the evidence that they did:

The view that group selection is needed to explain most human cooperation seems inconsistent with the fact that over the past several decades, most successful research on this cooperation has theorized that it is produced by individual-level adaptations (Price, 2011; Price and Johnson, 2011). The most influential and predictive theories of group cooperation have assumed that people contribute to group efforts in order to acquire resources for themselves, and that the main obstacle to successful cooperation is that members often do better individually by contributing less, or by consuming more, than would be optimal for group success (Hardin, 1968; Olson, 1965). These theories have served as the basis for an immense body of research which has demonstrated their predictive power; a quick overview of this research follows. Individual group members tend to acquire return benefits via their cooperation, by engaging in behaviors that can be regarded as n-person reciprocity or conditional cooperation (Fischbacher, Gaechter, and Fehr, 2001; Tooby, Cosmides, and Price, 2006), competitive altruism (Hardy and Van Vugt, 2006; Roberts, 1998), and status-for-altruism transactions (Price, 2003, 2006); they free ride frequently, when they can get away with it (Fehr and Gaechter, 2000); they monitor other members’ contribution levels so that they can detect and punish free riding (Ostrom, 1990; Price, 2006), and they experience more punitive sentiment towards free riders when they are more individually vulnerable to being free ridden (Price, 2005; Price, Cosmides, and Tooby, 2002); they engage in partner choice, which allows highly cooperative individuals to assort positively and thus avoid being exploited by free riders (Barclay and Willer, 2007; Page, Putterman and Unel, 2005); and they engage in more cooperation and third party punishment when they can acquire more reputational benefits from doing so, or when they detect cues that their actions are being monitored (Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts, 2006; Kurzban, DeScioli, and O’Brien, 2007; Milinski, Semmann, and Krambeck, 2002).

Price notes that the book’s main argument against individual selection is based on games conducted by experimental psychologists showing that cooperation continues even when the participants get no individual-level benefits.  His response is that such games are not realistic models about how cooperation probably evolved in our ancestors:

The main problem with this suggestion has been pointed out repeatedly (Trivers, 2004; Burnham and Johnson, 2005; Hagen and Hammerstein, 2006; Price, 2008): Experimental economic games are not ecologically valid contexts from which to draw conclusions about how humans are adapted for one-shot, “anonymous” social activity. One-shot games are easy enough to orchestrate in experimental labs, but what would the analogue be in ancestral environments? Ancestrally, no experimenter was present to enforce the one-shot nature of an interaction, so social interactions were intrinsically iterative; for instance, if you cheated somebody, he might retaliate (Trivers, 2004). There’s no real reason, therefore, to expect the human mind to be adapted to a one-shot interaction context, or to process such experimental interactions as if they were truly one-shot. Further, for a behavior to be perceived as anonymous in the ancestral past, the actor would need to feel sure that no one else could consciously observe the act (e.g., she would need to be alone in the middle of the forest). This is nothing at all like the environment of an experimental lab, where you may be surrounded by other participants, you believe you are interacting with other conscious participants, and you know that your behavior is being recorded and scrutinized by researchers. Even if a participant consciously believes that his behavior is anonymous, his semi-autonomous adaptations producing his cooperative behavior may not act as if they believe this.

In sum, results from experimental economics games can be highly illuminating and useful for many purposes, but just like any kind of behavioral data, they have limitations. It is doubtful that experimental economic results actually reveal much of anything about how people are adapted for one-shot anonymous interactions, and they should not be regarded as evidence about the relevance of the individual as a vehicle of selection in ancestral environments.

Price gives the book a mixed review, praising it for its review of the literature on cooperation and of the models designed to explain it, but faults it for the unrealism of the formal models and its neglect of empirical data inimical to the book’s thesis. I haven’t yet read the book, but I found the review illuminating. So few book reviews these days do anything more than summarize the book’s contents and tack on a superficial positive judgment like, ‘This is a book that belongs on every graduate student’s shelf.”

____________

Price, M. 2012.  Group selection theories are more sophisticated, but are they more predictive? (A review of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ). Evolutionary Psychology 10:45-49

Lenticular clouds over Colorado

January 31, 2012 • 9:35 am

I love lenticular clouds, and used to see them all the time over the Owens Valley of California. This photo was taken by Richard Hahn, who describes it along with co-author Jim Foster:

The photo above showing a phenomenal display of lenticular clouds was observed near Estes Park, Colorado on the evening of January 5, 2012. I was on the south side of Deer Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park when the setting Sun lit up the western sky in shades of copper and tangerine. Lenticular clouds are a type of wave cloud that typically occur on the lee side of mountain ranges and form when air is forced upward as it moves over higher terrain. In winter, these clouds are often accompanied by downsloping winds ushering in warmer weather to the Front Range of the Rockies. The lack of snow in the foreground is evidence of prior downsloping and of the relatively warm, dry conditions that have prevailed in Colorado during the early winter. Photo taken at 5:02 p.m.

To see this in all its splendor, click to enlarge:

h/t: Diane G.