April 27, 2012, 10:39 AM ET

'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'

“History, if used as a depository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” This opening sentence, of one of the most important books of the twentieth century, is undoubtedly the reason why I emoted so irritably on reading my fellow philosopher Alex Rosenberg’s approving quotation of Henry Ford’s opinion that “history is bunk.” The book of course is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and this year we are celebrating its 50th anniversary. I first read it in 1966, and I still remember how forcibly it struck me. Suddenly studying the nature of science had a whole new exciting dimension and I was not going to miss out on it. At once, I was led to reading Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and later this year I shall celebrate this fact by bringing out (as editor) ... Read More

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April 25, 2012, 05:53 PM ET

White TV Actually Mirrors Increasingly Isolated White America

The recent media firestorm over the whiteness of the HBO series Girls is somewhat puzzling for two reasons: One, why pick on Girls when so much of television is glaringly white and two, why be surprised that a show set in New York City could still lack racial diversity? Girls is being bashed for being all-white because it is at least not yet another show written by men about women. As Mauren Ryan writes over at the Huffington Post,

women and people of color, who are often treated as the tokens they usually are, are typically the junior members of a writing staff, hardly able to challenge those around them and push for the kind of stories that would reflect their lives and worldviews more accurately.

In other words, shows like How I Met Your Mother are forgiven their whiteness because they are not breaking through the glass ceiling in terms of who is writing the show. The other question... Read More

April 25, 2012, 03:33 PM ET

A Message from the Canadian Province of Alberta

Right at the moment I am reading a very interesting book, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation, by a colleague, Amanda Porterfield. She is tackling a problem that has long puzzled me, how was it that a nation founded by deists (even those ostensibly Christian tended to avoid taking communion and that sort of thing) could become so fervently evangelical by, let us say, about 1840 (although in fact it happened earlier than that). I will talk about the book itself at a later date, but now I want to puzzle about the hold that this idiosyncratic form of Protestantism still has on so many Americans. I am tempted to say simply that religion ruins everything. I know that that is not true. My Quaker childhood was surrounded by people who sincerely tried to do good because of their Christian faith. But when I see the nastiness – hostility to women, to gays and... Read More

April 25, 2012, 09:51 AM ET

Female Friendship

Merging commonsensical prose, sardonic wit and a broad knowledge of science, Natalie Angier writes smart, delightful essays about science. Like Brainstorm’s David Barash, she likes to connect the dots between animal and human behavior. In a recent column in The New York Times, “The Spirit of Sisterhood Is in the Air and on the Air,” Angier argues that when it comes to sisterly camaraderie, the young women on HBO’s new hit series Girls behave, in essentials, exactly like female elephants, chimps, baboons, and monkeys. Angier points to a number of scientific studies demonstrating that girlfriends are hardly unique to Homo sapiens. Adult females in many other parts of the animal kingdom bond together in tight social units where they help out one another, hang out with one another, and most importantly, lend emotional support to one another. The young highly educated post-grads on... Read More

April 24, 2012, 02:42 PM ET

So You're Defending Your Dissertation Tomorrow!

Dearest ATS, Congratulations: It's a BOOK! Your 273-page volume--the weighty, serious, mighty tome--is sitting in the center of my cluttered desk. Since it's bigger than everything else around it (how small and slight those 20-page student papers look in comparison!), I can't miss it. It'll be there tomorrow when we all meet to perform the one-to-two-hour ritual during which you "defend" your work to your advisers, your committee members, and your colleagues. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, photocopied and given away to friends and students so often over the years I no longer have a version, was of a woman reaching across a seminar table and socking a guy in the eye in front of six well-dressed adults, with one of them commenting to the group "Excellent defense. Let's give her the doctorate!" It won't be like that tomorrow, I promise. You've already won this race; now there's... Read More

April 24, 2012, 01:29 PM ET

The Alawadi Murder and the Wearing of the Hijab in America

Today's episode of Faith Complex was conceived in the aftermath of a disturbing crime which has received comparatively little play in the national media. In broad outline, the case involves the brutal murder of an Iraqi-born American citizen and mother of five, Shaima Alawadi, in her home near San Diego. There are conflicting reports regarding a note found near the victim's body (Ms. Alawadi died three days after the attack). In some versions, it reads: "This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist." The initial reaction to this matter was that it was a hate crime aimed at a Muslim-American woman whose wearing of the hijab drew conspicuous attention to her identity. As our interviewer and our guest, Dr. Jerusha Lamptey, make clear, however, there is no definitive evidence that this was in fact a hate crime. In recent weeks, commentators have questioned the idea that this was an ... Read More

April 24, 2012, 10:23 AM ET

The Psychopath Dilemma

I don’t mean the dilemma faced by psychopaths, but the dilemma presented to us by them. Whether called psychopaths or sociopaths (the terms are essentially synonymous), the reality is that there is a certain proportion of the population—and as far as can be told, this is true of pretty much every population—who fit the diagnostic bill. Of these, the most recent and horrifying example is Anders Breivik, currently on trial for murdering 77 Norwegians (most of them children) in July, 2011. His trial has riveted the customarily placid citizens of Norway, as well as many others around the world. From a distance, at least, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Breivik is a 100-percent, dyed-in-the-wool psychopath, a category of mental illness that is extraordinarily troublesome, in at least three ways: (1) Psychopaths, who appear to make up roughly 1-2 percent of the population, are... Read More

April 23, 2012, 09:24 PM ET

More Depressing News About College Debt

Of all the news about the ballooning college debt in this country--now said to top a trillion dollars--none has depressed me more than this piece in last week's Wall Street Journal. It's perhaps not surprising but all of that debt is influencing other life decisions young adults are making. Sure, we joke about how 20-somethings move back to Mom and Dad's basement to save money. But these are people who are putting off marriage and having kids in order to pay off loans. Here's the start of the piece: Between the ages of 18 and 22, Jodi Romine took out $74,000 in student loans to help finance her business-management degree at Kent State University in Ohio. What seemed like a good investment will delay her career, her marriage and decision to have children. Ms. Romine's $900-a-month loan payments eat up 60% of the paycheck she earns as a bank teller in Beaufort, S.C., the best job... Read More

April 23, 2012, 08:26 AM ET

Liberals, Conservatives, and the Haidt Results

Jonathan Haidt's research and writings have received ample notice in recent months, including this profile in The Chronicle, this upcoming panel at American Enterprise Institute, and this article by Haidt in Reason Magazine. One reason is that Haidt and colleagues have designed studies that attempt to measure differences between conservatives and liberals, and the results have been newsworthy. Among his premises is the identification of six pairings of "moral concerns," namely, care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. One of the applications of those pairings is a study that Haidt describes in Reason this way: "In a study I conducted with colleagues Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than 2,000 American visitors to fill out... Read More

April 23, 2012, 05:32 AM ET

The Biggest Student Uprising You've Never Heard Of

A guest post by Lilian Radovac. (BTW, SoCal readers may want to know that Marc is speaking at UC-Irvine a 4 p.m. 4/23 on New Media/New Protests.) On an unseasonably warm day in late March, a quarter of a million postsecondary students and their supporters gathered in the streets of Montreal to protest against the Liberal government’s plan to raise tuition fees by 75% over five years. As the crowd marched in seemingly endless waves from Place du Canada, dotted with the carrés rouges, or red squares, that have become the symbol of the Quebec student movement, it was plainly obvious that this demonstration was the largest in Quebec’s, and perhaps Canadian, history. The March 22nd Manifestation nationale was not the culmination but the midpoint of a 10-week-long student uprising that has seen, at its height, over 300,000 college and university students join an unlimited and... Read More