May 26, 2012, 7:19 am
By David Barash
One consequence of global warming (Wikipedia)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, than one with dutifully data-derived dancing dots doubtless deserves double. So, it is with gratitude to the Department of Commerce and its subordinate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (dupes of the commie climate-change conspiracy, all of them), that I alert y’all to the following Web site, which provides an intriguing, readily understood picture of global carbon-dioxide levels based on sampling stations around the world, as well as going back in prehistoric, pre-human time. It’s even fun to watch. Just click here, and then be patient; it takes a few seconds to load and a few minutes to watch, but repays the investment. In case you missed it, CLICK HERE.
That’s right: HERE.
A few…
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May 22, 2012, 11:31 am
By David Barash
Trident II missile, just fired from nuclear submarine (Wikipedia)
There’s a noteworthy trend among retired military and civilian officials who, in their professional capacity, held senior roles with regard to our nuclear weaponry: When they retire, they often see the error of their ways, denounce what they have done and apologize for how they “succeeded” in their careers. Here is Prospero, in the fifth act of The Tempest:
…But this rough magic
I here abjure…I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than ever did plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
Unlike Prospero, however, these people cannot break their magic staff and drown their book – i.e., undo the harm they have done; moreover, unlike Prospero, they are real. For example, former Defense Secretary…
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May 18, 2012, 10:29 am
By David Barash
The jewel in the lotus and vice versa (Wikipedia)
The connection (or lack thereof) between science and religion has been debated as long as science and religion have existed. Some scientists accept the late Stephen Jay Gould’s suggestion that the two are “NOMA”—Non-Overlapping Magesteria—because science and religion occupy distinct realms, the former concerned with what is, the latter with what should be. Others (including myself) reject NOMA, pointing out that religion often makes claims about the real world that not only overlap with those of science, but are frequently contradicted by the latter.
There is, however, an intriguing exception: Buddhism. Perhaps this is because Buddhism is as much philosophy as religion, or maybe because Buddhism is somehow more “valid” than, say, the…
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May 14, 2012, 10:59 am
By David Barash
United Nations Peacekeeping Missions, of which R2P would presumably constitute a subset (Wikipedia)
Writing a new edition to one of your own textbooks is a two-edged sword that leaves me suitably ambivalent. On the plus side, it’s encouraging that one’s book did well enough to induce the publisher to urge an update (even if part of the motivation is simply that used-book sales are beginning to impinge on the bottom line); on the minus, going over material that you’ve already written, and then rewritten in previous editions, can taste a bit like old chewing gum in your mouth. So it is with mixed emotions that I’ve been preparing a new third edition of Peace and Conflict Studies (Sage, co-authored with Charles P. Webel).
Then again, there are some added personal payoffs, notably the stimulus to…
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May 10, 2012, 7:00 am
By David Barash
(from Wikipedia)
I confess to having been surprised (pleasantly) when President Obama indicated his personal support for gay marriage. After all, if I were his political guru, I would probably have advised the president to keep straddling that particular fence, even though I strongly support gay marriage. Why? Because for all of Mitt Romney’s shape-shifting as part of his pandering to the Republican far right, Romney has staked out a clear position in this regard. At the same time and despite the existence of pro-gay “Log Cabin Republicans,” there is simply no question but that the Democrats are more receptive to gay and lesbian rights. To be blunt, LGBT supporters have nowhere else to go. As a result, it would almost certainly have been to the president’s political advantage to maintain a kind…
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May 8, 2012, 1:00 pm
By David Barash
PhD regalia from Singapore (note, btw, the absence of a head). Is this what constitutes credentials? (Wikipedia)
Regular readers of this blog (all two or three of them), will have noticed that I sometimes write about peace and war – especially the nuclear variety. In the process, I’ve been amused by occasional comments to the effect that I, an evolutionary biologist, have no business presuming to step outside my officially sanctioned expertise. My amusement stems from the fact that indeed (albeit evidently unknown to some people at least), I really have credentials in this respect, and lots of them. But more interestingly, it leads to a worthwhile subject for present and future discussion: What are we to make of the question of scholarly credentials and the legitimacy of holding forth on any topic?…
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May 5, 2012, 11:32 am
By David Barash
In an effort to defend fellow conservative Brainstorm blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley, Mark Bauerlein just wrote what appears to be—and in fact is—a criticism of Black Studies generally, concluding that “The bigger problem is that any academic discipline that assumes a social mission for itself is always going to have a legitimacy issue.” I daresay this assertion itself has a legitimacy issue.
What about the goal of a humanities education, variously described as producing literate citizens, generating an educated public that appreciates the cultural achievements of civilization, enhancing the public’s capacity for critical thinking, and so forth? For that matter, what about schools of business, agriculture, mining, aeronautics, or engineering, with which I suspect Professor Bauerlein has no objection? Or education? Doesn’t it have a social mission?
And what of Schools of…
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May 2, 2012, 5:57 pm
By David Barash
After the L.A. Times recently published photos showing U.S. soldiers posing triumphantly with the desecrated bodies—or in the current case, body parts—I received numerous requests for media interviews, since people wanted to know why so many presumably good American boys regularly engage in such clearly bad behavior.
I suggested that there are probably many answers, some of them relatively easy to grasp. Thus, many of these soldiers are 19 and 20 years old, little more than children. Although they have been invested with awesome killing power and subjected to serious training as to what behavior is acceptable and what is not, the fact remains that especially under conditions of high stress, very young adults (perhaps males in particular) are more driven by their hormones than by higher thought processes. Indeed, it is precisely their lack of “cerebral inhibition” that makes …
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April 29, 2012, 12:59 pm
By David Barash
You all know what this is (from Wikipedia)
Today’s New York Times included an important article for anyone concerned about the possibility of imminent war in the Middle East, not to mention nuclear war in general. “Remarks by Former Official Fuel Israeli Discord on Iran” reported that public discord has been growing between the Israeli civilian and military leadership over the desirability of a pre-emptive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Evidently, the recently retired head of Israel’s Shin Bet (equivalent to our FBI) strongly criticized the civilian Israeli leadership, saying that “I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings. I have observed them from up close. I fear very much that these are not the people I’d want at the wheel.”
This…
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April 28, 2012, 10:05 am
By David Barash
One perspective on "the creation" (from Wikipedia)
I must confess that I don’t regularly read the excellent blog “why evolution is true” maintained by fellow evolutionist and atheist Jerry Coyne, mostly because he writes so much, and I read so slowly. Jerry somehow manages to generate a gazillion words per day, every day, and I’m the kind of stubbornly slow-mo reader who must carefully pronounce every polysyllabic name in a 19th century Russian novel. With so much wonderful material out there on the Web (not to mention all those great Russian novels!), we slow-pokes have to pick and choose carefully.
And so, I was grateful when a friend and colleague (who, with astounding assiduity, actually reads my blog as well as Jerry Coyne’s) just told me that some time ago, Dr. Coyne had preceded me in…
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April 24, 2012, 10:23 am
By David Barash
2009 passport photo of Anders Breivik (photo from Norwegian police via Wikipedia)
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…
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April 20, 2012, 11:54 am
By David Barash
(from Wikipedia)
Missiles have been in the news lately, for better and worse.
Better: North Korea’s much ballyhooed launch of a long-range missile (ostensibly intended to propel a satellite, but equally serviceable, in fact, for nuclear weapons) turned out to be a spectacular failure. The world needs North Korea endowed with ICBM capability, adding to its shaky nuclear arsenal, like it needs (as my grandmother used to say) “a hole in the head.” So I’m glad it fizzled, although I worry that the ever-bizarre North Korean government, now seeking legitimacy for its newly installed “dearest”—or at least, youngest—leader, might try some other stunt, just to continue its ankle-biting ways.
Worse: Just yesterday, India announced the successful launch of its latest missile, the Agni 5,…
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April 20, 2012, 8:07 am
By David Barash
A 1963 protest (Photo from Flickr/CC collection of Cornell U.'s Kheel Center)
I’ve been making trouble lately (neither for the first nor the last time), writing about race (Part 1 and Part 2), and how it is not simply a “socio-cultural construct,” but rather, is simultaneously biologically “real”—at least, as real as the concept of race or subspecies when applied to any other animal species—and yet also trivial in that the traits in question don’t seem to reflect anything interesting or important. Like “subspecies” in all other critters, race is a tricky, slippery concept, one that looks real (like a cloud) from a distance but that dissolves when grasped, and whose boundaries are porous and indistinct. But like clouds (and like it or not) races too are part of our landscape.
Responding…
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April 15, 2012, 6:17 am
By David Barash
Racial differences are as real, and as trivial, as differences between those who can and cannot roll their tongues. (Flickr/CC user glenngould's mom, apparently, can.)
As the Stones might have sung, but didn’t: “Don’t play with race ’cause you’re playin’ with fire …” In an earlier post, I played with fire, kicked a hornet’s nest, obtained a dragon tattoo—whatever—when I argued that it may be politically correct but it’s also downright silly to deny the biological existence of what are loosely (but accurately) called different human “races.”
There is no simple answer to the seemingly simple question: How many human races are there? It depends on how finely-grained you choose to analyze the data (and data there are). “Splitters” have identified more than 30; “lumpers,” no more …
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April 11, 2012, 12:02 am
By David Barash
"Well done. Now play ball!" (Photo by Flickr/CC user Martijn.Munneke)
I don’t give a fig about spectator sports and haven’t since I was a young child. Some time ago, having become an adult, I put away such childish things. But I do care about freedom of speech, which caused me to do a double-take when I noticed that Venezuelan-born Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillén just ignited a firestorm of protest when he expressed his man-love for Cuba’s invalid former caudillo, Fidel Castro.
Sorry … for Cuba’s murderous, tyrannical, Hitlerian, Stalinistic, despotic, humanity-hating, mother-&$^#^#ing, devil incarnated, ruthless, godless, sonofabitch Fidel Castro. Is that better? After all, I don’t want to be suspended for what I say, as just happened to Mr. Guillén.
How remarkable! Astonishing! …
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April 9, 2012, 8:03 am
By David Barash
Trayvon Martin
Here’s a delicate subject, especially given the nationwide anguish over what appears to have been the cold-blooded, racially lubricated if not racially motivated murder of Trayvon Martin: race itself. More specifically and more delicately: whether race is a “socio-cultural construct.” My response, and one that may well disappoint and annoy many readers, regardless of their ideology (but perhaps especially my fellow travelers on the left): It is and it isn’t, but mostly isn’t. That is to say, an objective, science-based look at the subject and at its use in other contexts requires us to conclude that race is both socially constructed and biologically “real,” but probably more the latter than the former.
Of course, in the old days of racist pseudoscience, it was universally …
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April 6, 2012, 7:58 am
By David Barash
Guest blog by Richard Falk:
In his important article in The New York Times, March 17, 2012, James Risen summarized the consensus of the intelligence community as concluding that Iran abandoned its program to develop nuclear weapons in 2003, and that no persuasive evidence exists that it has departed from this decision. It might have been expected that such news based on the best evidence that billions spent to get the most reliable possible assessments of such sensitive security issues would produce a huge sigh of relief in Washington, but on the contrary it has been totally ignored, including by the highest officers in the government. The president has not even bothered to acknowledge this electrifying conclusion that should have put the brakes on what appears to be a slide toward a disastrous regional war. We must ask why such a prudent and positive course of action has not been…
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April 4, 2012, 11:07 am
By David Barash
I don’t usually post short blogs (as some of you know, to your chagrin!), neither do I like to quote extensively from other sources, nor am I normally inclined to poach on Jacques’s bailiwick, but an article in today’s New York Times made me feel downright proud to be a self-identified atheist Jew, in a country one of whose major political parties has lost all rational and humane compass – as witnessed by the most recent Paul Ryan budget: “A poll of American Jewish voters,” reported the Times,
shows that they overwhelmingly support Barack Obama for president, just as they did four years ago, and that Israel and Iran rank low on their list of priority issues in the presidential election. The results cast doubt on the claim that Mr. Obama has alienated a significant swath of Jewish voters because of his rocky relationship with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We …
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April 3, 2012, 7:56 am
By David Barash
I just read a review, written by the renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Titled “How to Dispel Your Illusions,” it appeared in The New York Review of Books several months ago. (I’d been out of the country since December and it’s taking me a while to catch up.) Dyson is one of the NYRB’s regular go-to guys about all things scientific, and although I don’t always agree with what he has to say (in particular, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool technophile, much too inclined, in my opinion, to admire high-tech solutions to such problems as global climate disruption), I’m also prone to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially on matters involving “hard science,” since Mr. Dyson is—after all—one of the acknowledged greats of contemporary physics.
I found Dyson’s review mildly disappointing, since he didn’t really engage…
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March 30, 2012, 5:48 am
By David Barash
Auguste Comte
This query might well sound pretty absurd, and in a sense, it is. Thus, I would bet that within the academy, fewer sociologists per capita are racist than are members of any other discipline. Indeed, sociologists have been in the forefront when it comes to researching the various causes and consequences of racism, and have been among the loudest when it comes to proclaiming (erroneously, I believe—but that is a topic for another post) that race is “socially constructed” from the ground up, and thus altogether independent of biology. Right here in this selfsame Brainstorm venue, moreover, I have learned quite a lot from Laurie Essig’s posts concerning the often-hidden racist assumptions behind much of modern American life. And Laurie is a sociologist….
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