The Golden Steves: the good alternative to the Oscars

January 25, 2012 • 10:15 am

My nephew Steven, a film buff about to get his master’s in film at Columbia, annually nominates his picks for the “Golden Steve” awards, which he humbly describes thusly:

Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics.Impervious to bribery, unreceptive to ballyhoo, disgusted by sentiment and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might legitimately be termed “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 160 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. Winners will be announced Saturday, January 28th.

You can find his choices here.

Of his “best picture” awards, I’ve seen but two (my moviegoing has been scant this year): “Certified Copy” and “The Tree of Life”.  As I’ve posted before, I find the first one brilliant and the second execrable.  We’ve of course had huge arguments about “The Tree of Life,” but he’s recalcitrant.

More censorship at British universities

January 25, 2012 • 7:00 am

The trouble at University College London, where a huge kerfuffle arose because a student secular society published the Jesus and Mo cartoon shown below (and the president of that society was forced to resign), has now spread to the London School of Economics (LSE).

The cause of all the trouble!

According to The New Humanist, the Atheist, Secularist, and Humanist Society (ASHS) of the LSE put the same cartoon on their Facebook page, and was ordered by the LSE Student Union to remove it or be disenfranchised.  The Union issued this statement:

“On Monday 16th January it was brought to our attention via an official complaint by two students that the LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society posted cartoons, published by the UCLU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, depicting the Prophet Mohammed and Jesus “sitting in a pub having a pint” on their society Facebook page. Upon hearing this, the sabbaticals officers of the LSESU ensured all evidence was collected and an emergency meeting with a member of the Students’ Union staff was called to discuss how to deal with the issue. During this time, we received over 40 separate official complaints from the student body, in addition to further information regarding more posts on the society Facebook page.

It was decided that the President and other committee members of the LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society would be called for an informal meeting to explain the situation, the complaints that had been made, and how the action of posting these cartoons was in breach of Students’ Union policy on inclusion and the society’s constitution. This meeting took place on Friday 20th January at 10.30am. The society agreed to certain actions coming out of the meeting and these were discussed amongst the sabbatical team. In this discussion it was felt that though these actions were positive they would not fully address the concerns of those who had submitted complaints. Therefore the SU will now be telling the society that they cannot continue these activities under the brand of the SU.

The LSE Students’ Union would like to reiterate that we strongly condemn and stand against any form of racism and discrimination on campus. The offensive nature of the content on the Facebook page is not in accordance with our values of tolerance, diversity, and respect for all students regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or religious affiliation. There is a special need in a Students’ Union to balance freedom of speech and to ensure access to all aspects of the LSESU for all the ethnic and religious minority communities that make up the student body at the LSE.”

This is a masterpiece of dissimulation: the cartoon is not racist (Muslims are not a race!), and it doesn’t mandate discrimination.  It is a criticism of religion.  Saying that that is “discrimination” is equivalent to saying that a poster criticizing the Conservative Party is discrimination.  Why is it offensive to criticize religion but not political belief?  It is amazing that universities, which should be the very locus for dissent and discussion, would prohibit free criticism of religion in this way.  (You should, by the way, always be wary when you hear calls to balance free speech.)

According to the New Humanist, the ASHS will not comply; part of the statement they issued says the following:

“There are no reasonable grounds for the LSESU’s instruction because we are in no way violating their policies or byelaws. The cartoons on our Facebook page criticise religion in a satirical way and we totally reject any claim that their publications could constitute any sort of harassment or intimidation of Muslims or Christians. . . “.

A document prepared by the LSE Student Union for this Thursday’s discussion about criticism of Islam is disgraceful (and misspelled!):

Union believes
1. In the right to criticise religion,
2. In freedom of speech and thought,
3. It has a responsibility to protect its members from hate crime and hate speech,
4. Debate on religious matters should not be limited by what may be offensive to any
particular religion, but the deliberate and persistent targeting of one religious group about any
issue with the intent or effect of being Islamophobic (‘Islamophobia’ as defined below) will not
be tolerated.
5. That Islamophobia is a form of anti-Islamic racism.

Numbers 1 and 2 are completely at odds with #4.  If one is free to criticize religion, then why is it prohibited to criticize one religion more than others?  Presumably because, according to the document, “Islamophobia” is not a religion but a form of racism.  That’s bogus: Islam is not a race but a religion, and Muslims come from many different ethnic groups, including those in Africa, Asia, and Middle East.  It’s time to stop giving Islam special treatment under freedom of speech laws, especially if that’s just a response to Muslim threats of violence.

The dysfunctionality of America: income inequality, religion, and evolution

January 25, 2012 • 6:00 am

In his State of the Union Address last night, President Obama made a big deal about the huge income inequality among Americans, with much of the wealth in the hands of a few while manylive in poverty.  Although we’re a relatively wealthy nation in terms of gross domestic product per capital, we’re also one of the most unequal in the world.  This inequality has been increasing in the U.S. for several decades.

It’s not often realized that, regardless of per-capita wealth, income inequality is correlated with a number of indices of social dysfunctionality.

You can see this relationship graphically (in both senses) at Sociological Images, in a post called “Income inequality is bad for society. Really bad.“.  Here are a few correlations among nations between income inequality and indices of social dysfunction (these are apparently taken from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett‘s book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better). Note the extreme position of the United States.

Infant mortality (I’m not sure what statistic they use to measure income inequality; it may well be the “Gini Index”):

Homicide rate:

Rate of incarceration:

Child well being (UNICEF measure):

Now of course this doesn’t imply that income inequality is the cause of all the dysfunctionality, for there could be other variable that affect dysfunctionality and these other measures as well.  Insecurity could be such a factor. Nevertheless, it’s a good working hypothesis that this kind of inequality breeds not only social unrest, which leads to crime, drug use, incarceration, and the like, but also bespeaks a lack of caring for the welfare of the poor, leading to things like high infant mortality.  The Equality Trust goes into these figures in detail, explaining the alternative hypotheses.

And then there’s another index of what most of us would see as dysfunctionality: the degree of religious belief.  The work of Solt et al., which I’ve discussed before, shows that income inequality is also highly correlated among nations with religiosity: the more unequal a nation, the more religious its inhabitants. Here’s a figure showing the positive correlation between income inequality (measured using the Gini index) and various measures of religiosity, taken from Solt et al..  Each dot is one country (see the link above for further information). The work of Tomas Rees leads to the same conclusion.

Here the pathway of causation is clearer: as I wrote before:

[As Solt et al. note], “Increases in inequality in one year predict substantial gains in religiosity in the next,” while “past values of religiosity do not predict future values of inequality.” In other words, the correlation between religiosity and inequality is driven by the former responding to the latter, and not the other way around.  Unequal incomes lead to societies becoming more religious.

Finally, we know that religiosity is highly correlated among nations with acceptance of evolution: the less religious nations have higher acceptance of that theory. Here’s a graph I made of that correlation among 34 countries, with data taken from Miller and Scott (2006), the Eurobarometer surveys, and a few other places. Note again the bad position of the US: next to the bottom in accepting evolution (the most resistant nation is Turkey).

As for the causes of this, I think it’s more likely that the inherent religiosity of a nation affects its inhabitant’s acceptance of evolution rather than reverse theory: acceptance of evolution makes a country more atheistic.  I favor the former idea because people imbibe religion earlier in their lives than they learn evolution (if they learn it at all).  ]

While this suggests that the way to make evolution more acceptable is to weaken the grasp of religion on the world, doing that may require larger structural changes in society, for the work cited above suggests that religiosity is itself a byproduct of social dysfunction, which itself may result from a grossly unequal distribution of incomes (see also the work of Greg Paul that I’ve discussed several times).

But of course the acceptance of evolution is a matter far less pressing than issues like homicide, drug use, and child mortality.  If we can reduce much of that dysfunctionality—and religiosity—by creating a more just and equal society, I predict that the acceptance of evolution will increase as well. One could regard of acceptance of evolution itself as one sign of a healthy society. We can start by eliminating the tax loopholes that enable the very wealthy to pay far fewer taxes than they should (viz. Mitt Romney).

h/t: Matthew Cobb via Ed Yong

New and open science: the end of peer review?

January 24, 2012 • 9:55 am

The publication of scientific papers is slowly becoming more “open,” meaning not only that in some fields (like math or physics) many of them don’t undergo the usual review process, but also that journals are increasingly adopting a policy of having free and open public access (the PLoS journals are an example), a feature subsidized by charging rather high fees to the scientists who submit papers.  And scientists now have their very own Facebook equivalent, ResearchGate, where you can link to your papers, discuss those papers or other scientific questions, and find colleagues or collaborators.

In the January 16 issue of the New York Times, Thomas Lin discusses the rapidly changing face of scientific publication in a piece called “Cracking open the scientific process.”

Some of this change is facilitated, of course, by bloggers, who demand immediate access to everything, and the ability to discuss results as soon as they’re printed:

On [last] Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”

Indeed, he said, scientists who attend the conference should not be seen as competing with one another. “Lindsay Lohan is our competitor,” he continued. “We have to get her off the screen and get science there instead.”

Well, no, Lindsay Lohan is not our competitor: those who follow that sort of tabloid journalism simply won’t be following scientific advances.  We have to realize that despite all of our efforts, a large fraction of the American public simply can’t be induced to follow science.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t increase our efforts to popularize our work, simply that you can’t interest everyone all of the time.

But I do approve of much of the open-access movement.  There are, however, problems with it, some of them highlighted in the Times piece.

  • If there is no peer review of published papers, then there is no quality control, at least not beyond that made on posts following online publication.  I myself have benefitted tremendously from the comments of reviewers, and also vet my papers to my colleagues before submitting them to journals.
  • Peer review, however flawed, is a sign of professional acceptance and recognition, and peer-reviewed papers (like grants) are appropriate measures of professional success for promotion, tenure, and other ways to climb the scientific ladder.
  • Open publication is expensive for the scientist, often costing several thousand dollars.

But there are upsides, too:

  • Much scientific research in the U.S. and other countries is funded by government agencies (the NSF, NIH, and USDA in our country), and that money comes from taxpayers. Why should they have to pay again to get access to scientific articles reporting research funded by the taxpayers? Publicly funded research should be publicly available.
  • The peer review system is slow: in the bad old days, for example, it took a year from when a paper was submitted to some evolution-related journals to when that paper appeared.  That’s not a terrible problem in my field, since evolutionary research doesn’t become obsolete quickly, but it is a problem in faster-moving fields like physics and molecular biology.
  • If there are problems with a paper, those problems used to take a long time to become public: other scientists would write a note of critique or response, which then had to be reviewed, another process that could take months. By that time people had largely forgotten the original paper. This was compounded by the policy of many journals (I think Science and Nature are among these) to publish the original articles in the paper journals but the responses only online. This problem has become somewhat alleviated by the instant reaction of bloggers to research that seems dubious, such as the Darwinius fossil paper and the dubious “arsenic-based life” paper.

My own views on this are the following:

  • Retain peer-reviewed papers, at least in biology, as a way to ensure quality and establish criteria for professional advancement.
  • Papers should be published online as soon as they are accepted in final form; eventually, all publication should be online only as a way to save trees, energy, and other resources. (This does create some problems for me because I simply can’t read articles on a computer screen and must print them out. However, I don’t print out every article in a journal, so there’s still a net saving of paper.)
  • If formal critiques are accepted by a paper journal, they should be published in that paper journal instead of simply online. Nobody looks online for critiques (and hence will miss them) if they subscribe to the paper journal. If everything is online, critiques should be published following the paper as soon as they’re reviewed and accepted.
  • There should be a comment section (moderated) following online papers for scientists and others to weigh in on the research.
This does not solve all the problems, for there’s still the issue of expense.  Online journals will still have to make money to support their efforts and to moderate any comments if they allow comments.  But staff can be trimmed if journals become electronic, producing some savings.

Is there evidence for God?

January 24, 2012 • 5:31 am

Two readers called my attention to an interesting one-hour debate that aired on the BBC1 “Big Questions” show about a week ago. Two big groups of goddies and atheists participate in a total of four videos. If you click on the link below, all four will open in sequence.  Things start off pretty tame, but get heated in the third video.

Some of the arguments for God are familiar: religious scientists like Gregor Mendel prove that science and religion are compatible; natural selection can’t explain reciprocal altruism (of course it can, and altruism in humans may be largely a cultural rather than a genetic phenomenon); the cosmological argument applies to the Big Bang (this is handily countered by chemist Peter Atkins); the physical constants of the universe are “fine-tuned” for life (Peter Atkins again responds well); the existence of love testifies to the existence of God, as does the “fruitfulness” of the world; one guy heard God speaking to him (in English, of course), and so on.  One person even asserts that we don’t need evidence for God to accept his existence.

The emphasis on personal revelation as evidence for God is pervasive and remarkable (see a remarkable pwning of this notion by atheist Kate Smurthwaite at 5:20 in video 3). In fact, the bulk of the “evidence” adduced for God is of the form “He spoke to me personally.”

At 10:05 in video 2, there’s an exchange about theodicy in which Pastor Acquoi Karbah explains childhood leukemia as the result of sin that God sees as necessary.

Despite the seeming bias of moderator Nicky Campbell towards the goddies (and this may be merely my own bias), they don’t come off as having a coherent position, undoubtedly because they disagree not only about the preferred faith (Muslim vs. Christian), but also about whether God intervenes in the world.  The coherence is all on the side of the atheists, and if you spend an hour watching the video, you’ll be proud that you’re on that side.

The videos.

h/t: Sigmund, Rev. El Mundo

Kitteh contest: Zack

January 24, 2012 • 5:25 am

Here, from reader Tom, is the story of a church cat who became an atheist:

Hello, this is Zack. In 1992 he began life in an animal shelter in Berkley California. A woman lawyer adopted him as a kitten. He spent many hours in the office of this lawyer, learning the ways of a quiet office cat. By 1995, the lawyer decided to go to seminary school in Berkley. Zack spent many hours with her in her studies of religion and how to be a pastor’s cat. He lived in the dorm with the many students there, going from room to room negotiating treats. The law years must have done him well. Upon graduation in 1999, the pastor was assigned to a church in Boulder Creek, California and Zack became the church cat. The pastor needed a roommate so the search went out and eventually Liz came to live with Zack and the pastor. Liz brought with her a blind diabetic dog Harry and a boyfriend Tom who had no religion. These awesome people became good friends. Eventually the pastor moved through a couple of assignments taking Zack with her, ending up back in Berkley. The pastor became a dog person because of Liz and Harry and acquired a pair of Jack Russell terriers, who don’t live well with old cats. The pastor needed to find a new home for aging Zack. So Zack began a new life in 2005 in the godless home of Liz and Tom. Liz, Tom and Zack live happily together in Boulder Creek, curled up with good books.

Happy Belated Squirrel Appreciation Day

January 23, 2012 • 4:04 pm

by Greg Mayer

Last Saturday (Jan. 21) was Squirrel Appreciation Day, and I sort of missed it. We’ve considered squirrels and their polymorphisms here at WEIT many times, so in belated celebration, here’s a nice squirrel.

Sciurus variegatoides, Volcan Poas, Costa Rica, 29xii2011.

I didn’t miss it entirely, because Saturday was the day that one of my colleagues, who visited Costa Rica over the Christmas break, gave me a copy of her photograph of this beauty. The variegated squirrel is highly variable in color pattern: the NW Costa Rican subspecies is grayish white with black dorsal stripe (sort of like a skunk in negative).

The Washington Post’s John Kelly seems to have a thing for squirrels, and has done stories on squirrels and squirrel researchers, including my colleague Dick “Thor” Thorington of the Smithsonian. He has gotten readers to submit squirrel photos, and there’s a great slide show of them at the Post, including melanics,

Melanic squirrel, Washington Post

albinos,

Albino squirrel, Washington Post

and ones being watched by cats.

Cat and squirrel, Washington Post

Most of the pix are from the DC area, so the squirrels are mostly gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), but there are fox squirrels, flying squirrels, red squirrels, European red squirrels, and probably others in the show; it’s a good test of squirrel-id’ing ability.

Although we missed Squirrel Appreciation Day, we can begin our preparations now for Squirrel Week, which this year is April 8-14. Check out Kelly’s blog for updates and other squirrel articles.

Squirrel Week, April 8-14, 2012