"Animal Rights" Is a Complicated Issue

 
Ryan Gregory has put up an interesting posting on Genomicron [On speciesism]. He points out that most of the so-called "debate" about animal rights is at the level of 8th graders. Personally, I think he's being generous.

Ryan asks the following questions,

And so I ask, on what basis do you draw the sharp moral line between "humans" and "animals", "human rights" and "animal rights", "us" versus "them"? What rational argument do you bring in defense of speciesism? Perhaps you argue that only humans are capable of suffering, or that our intellectual capabilities are of a different kind from those of other animals. As Dawkins has noted, neither is compatible with what we understand about evolutionary history.

I don't have an answer to these questions even though I've been thinking about them far longer than youngsters like Ryan Gregory.

Swatting mosquitoes does not pose an ethical dilemma for me. Nor does eating beef, chicken, fish and shrimp. On the other hand, I don't fish and I don't hunt. I don't lose sleep over gorillas in a zoo but I do when they are killed in Africa.

There doesn't seem to be an easy answer to why some animals don't matter while others do.

I'd like to go beyond Ryan's question and include plants. What is the justification for caring about some animals and not about the weeds in your garden or the wheat plants that feed you? I don't think there is a rational basis for doing so. This seems to be one of those issues where rationality doesn't work. That makes me very uneasy.

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[Photo Credit: Smithsonian National Zoological Park]

Gene Genie #19

 

The 19th edition of Gene Genie has just been published on ScienceRoll [Gene Genie #19: Geneticalization].

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Goodbye Daylight Saving Time

 
Today we stopped using Daylight Saving Time in Canada.

Last Spring I posted an article about time zones [Happy Daylight Saving Time!]. It included the photograph shown here of a strange thing right outside my building on the University of Toronto campus. If you don't know what it is, follow the link.

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Note to students at the University of Toronto: This could be on the The University Exit Exam].

Are You Liberal or Conservative?

 
Today we start a new poll of Sandwalk readers. See the sidebar on the left of this posting.

Try and answer according to where you see yourself on the political left-right spectrum without paying too much attention to the labels. The "left wing" category isn't meant to imply radical Marxism; it's meant to encompass the views of most socialists in Europe. "Liberal" doesn't mean that you have to be a member of a "Liberal" (upper-case L) party. It just means somewhat left-of-center.

Similarly, "right-wing' doesn't mean you share the point of view some evil dictator. It means you have more in common with very conservative points of view than with more moderate conservatives.

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Happy Birthday Sandwalk!

 
Today is the first anniversary of this blog. My first posting on November 4, 2006 was Welcome to My Sandwalk. Since then there have been 1282 other postings for an average of 3.5 per day (whew!). My original goal was to average one science-related article per day and I think I've come close to that average. The others are just for fun.

I was told when I began that you have to attract hundreds of views per day in order to generate interesting comments and discussions. That seems to be about right. When I started I saw this blog as an experiment and I intended to re-evaluate after six months. When the six months was up I had not met many of my goals so it was a time of soul searching [My Six Months Are Up!]. What happened was I avoided making a decision so I just kept going by default. I'm glad I did. There are now lots of interesting discussions going on in the comments sections.

All of us science bloggers have discovered one important feature of science blogging. You hardly ever get comments about science. If you check those articles where I talked about science, there are almost no comments or discussion. On the other hand, as soon as you mention politics, religion, or racism, there are dozens of readers who want to speak up.

It's a puzzling phenomenon. That's not to say it isn't fun to talk about those non-science issues—it clearly is a lot of fun or we wouldn't be doing it. The puzzling thing is why there aren't more comments about the science.

From time-to-time I asked for photographs of readers who have walked the real sandwalk. I'd like to acknowledge those who sent in pictures.

Cody
The God Delusion
T. Ryan Gregory
PZ Myers
John Wilkins

I hope I haven't forgotten anyone. Send photographs if you're not on the list already.

For those of you who are interested in the numbers, here are the statistics for Sandwalk. What they mean is that Sandwalk is on the verge of making the transition from a low popularity blog to a medium popularity blog. For comparison, Pharyngula gets one million views a month or 20X more than Sandwalk. In terms of the Top100Science Sites Bad Astronomy is 468th, Pharyngula ranks 794th, and Sandwalk is 1006th

Sandwalk has a long, long way to go. I think I'll try for quality instead of quantity!

Here are the top five postings in terms of number of comments: [Arguing Against God] [The Evolution Poll of Sandwalk Readers] [Propaganda Techniques: Shift the Burden of Proof] [Genomics Is Dead! Long Live Systems Biology!] [Dennett on Adaptationism].

Sandwalk readers are a diverse group in terms of geography. Yes, it's true that a majority of readers come from USA addresses, but there's still a large number of you from Europe, Asia, and Australia. There are even a handful of readers from South America and Africa. Oops ... I almost forget—there are Canadian readers as well.

On other issues the Sandwalk readers are less diverse. About 70% of you are atheists and almost all of you accept evolution—even though it may be the wrong version of evolution.

Next month's poll is going to ask about education. I suspect that most readers have been to university. This month the poll will be about your political views, e.g. where you position yourself on the left-right spectrum. I'll be surprised if most readers don't lean to the left.

Anyway, thanks for reading so far. And please, keep those comments coming—that's the most fun part of blogging.

P.S. If you have any suggestions for improving the looks or content of Sandwalk this is your chance to mention them.

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You Gotta See This ...

 
Jason Rosenhouse says you gotta see this. I agree. It's how I feel every time I try and use Adobe Photoshop.

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The Peace Tower Clock Does Not Fall Back Tonight

 
Canada likes to think of itself as a progressive country—always moving forward. But this seems to be going to extremes. The clock on the Peace Tower (Parliament Buildings) does not go backwards. Thus, according to CBCNews [Time stops annually on Parliament Hill as Peace Tower clock falls back]...

While most Canadians scurry around their homes changing their clocks back to standard time this weekend, the clock-keepers of Parliament Hill will only sit and wait.

At 2 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Sunday, a Public Works employee will open a glass housing and flip a switch, bringing the 50-year-old mechanism that runs the Peace Tower clock, with its four faces, to a halt....

For 60 minutes, the technician will just wait and then will restart the 1950s-era electric motor drive that runs the big clock, several levels overhead, at exactly 2 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, according to the National Research Council time signal

They need to wait out the hour because the old motor drive only goes forward, says Brian Cook, the Public Works property manager for Parliament Hill.

At the risk of sounding stupid, why doesn't the technician just advance the clock eleven hours?

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You poor Amercans ....

 
I love the wit and humor of Canadian Cynic. From time to time he comes up with some very funny lines. Today is one of those times [ Suddenly, the parallels are starting to creep me out].

You poor Americans -- you have a leader whose party doesn't even have a majority, who's submitting one vile bit of legislation and one horrendous nomination after another, and you have an "opposition" that just rolls over and plays dead on all of it. I feel so sorry for you. Now up here in Canada, we ... we ... um ... actually, never mind.

I should have thought about that argument a bit harder, really.

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Dawkins on Watson

 
There's a lengthy article on the Guardian website about the Watson affair [Disgrace: How a giant of science was brought low]. It contains quotations from Richard Dawkins and Oxford neurologist Colin Blakemore,

In the end, Watson's decided to return home, so no meetings occurred, a move that has dismayed many scientists who believed that it was vital Watson confront his critics and his public. 'What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant "thought police", of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation,' said Richard Dawkins, who been due to conduct a public interview with Watson this week in Oxford.

Dawkins's stance was supported by Blakemore. 'Jim Watson is well known for being provocative and politically incorrect. But it would be a sad world if such a distinguished scientist was silenced because of his more unpalatable views.'

I agree with Dawkins. Watson was stupid to make those remarks but they were perfectly consistent with a lifelong career of being as politically incorrect as possible in today's society. Does that make him a racist whose career should be terminated?

Nor is it at all clear that Watson is a racist, a point stressed last week by the Pulitzer-winning biologist E O Wilson, of Harvard University. In his autobiography, Naturalist, Wilson originally described Watson, fresh from his Nobel success, arriving at Harvard's biology department and 'radiating contempt' for the rest of the staff. He was 'the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,' Wilson recalled. 'Having risen to fame at an early age, [he] became the Caligula of biology. He was given licence to say anything that came into his mind and expected to be taken seriously. And unfortunately he did so, with casual and brutal offhandedness.'

That is a fairly grim description, to say the least. However, there is a twist. There has been a rapprochement. 'We have become firm friends,' Wilson told The Observer last week. 'Today we are the two grand old men of biology in America and get on really well. I certainly don't see him as a Caligula figure any more. I have come to see him as a very intelligent, straight, honest individual. Of course, he would never get a job as a diplomat in the State Department. He is just too outspoken. But one thing I am absolutely sure of is that he is not a racist. I am shocked at what has happened to him.'

This is a clear case of political correctness out of control. I'm embarrassed to be associated with the people who attacked Watson and I admire Dawkins (and Blakemore) for standing up to them.

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Berlinski Quotes

 
In the comments section of Breaking News... Mathematicians Don't Believe in Evolution!, glennd points us to An Interview with David Berlinski on an Intelligent Design Creationist website. (Incidentally, the commenters on that thread do a good job of proving that Berlinski isn't a mathematician.

Here's are some of the eye-popping views of this "famous" mathematician "philosopher" ...

The Panda’s Thumb, on the other hand, is entirely low-market; the men who contribute to the blog all have some vague technical background – computer sales, sound mixing, low-level programming, print-shops or copy centers; they are semi-literate; their posts convey that characteristic combination of pustules and gonorrhea that one would otherwise associate with high-school toughs, with even the names – Sir Toejam, The Reverend Lenny Flank – suggesting nothing so much as a group of guys spending a great deal of time hanging around their basements running video games, eating pizzas, and jeering at various leggy but inaccessible young women.

Darwin’s theory is plain nuts. It is not supported by the evidence; it has no organizing principles; it is incoherent on its face; it flies against all common experience, and it is poisonous in its implications.

And another thing. It is easy to understand. Anyone can become an evolutionary biologist in an afternoon. Just read a book. Most of them are half illustrations anyway. It’s not like studying mathematics or physics, lot of head splitting stuff there.

But Dawkins …

DB: An interesting case, very louche – fascinating and repellant. Fascinating because like Noam Chomsky he has the strange power effortlessly to command attention. Just possibly both men are descended from a line of simian carnival barkers, great apes who adventitiously found employment at a circus. I really should look at this more closely. Repellent because Dawkins is that depressingly familiar figure – the intellectual fanatic. What is it that he has said? “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)”. Substitute ‘Allah’ for ‘evolution,’ and these words might have been uttered by some fanatical Mullah just itching to get busy with a little head-chopping. If he ever gets tired of Oxford, Dawkins could probably find a home at Finsbury Park.

It is a matter of attitude and sentiment, Look, for thousands of intellectuals, becoming a Marxist was an experience of disturbing intensity. The decision having been made, the world became simpler, brighter, cleaner, clearer. A number of contemporary intellectuals react in the same way when it comes to the Old Boy – Darwin, I mean. Having renounced Freud and all his wiles, the literary critic Frederick Crews – a man of some taste and sophistication – has recently reported seeing in random variations and natural selection the same light he once saw in castration anxiety or penis envy. He has accordingly immersed himself in the emollient of his own enthusiasm. Every now and then he contributes an essay to The New York Review of Books revealing that his ignorance of any conceivable scientific issue has not been an impediment to his satisfaction.

Another example – I’ve got hundreds. Daniel Dennett has in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea written about natural selection as the single greatest idea in human intellectual history. Anyone reading Dennett understands, of course, that his acquaintance with great ideas has been remarkably fastidious. Mais, je divague …

In the case of both Crews and Dennett, it’s that God-awful eagerness to explain everything that is the give-away. The eagerness is entirely academic or even literary. But, you know, what sociologists call prole-drift is present even in a world without proles. Look at Christopher Hitchens – very bright, very able. Just recently he felt compelled to release his views on evolution to a public not known eagerly to be waiting for them. What does he have to say? Pretty much that he doesn’t know anything about art but he knows what he likes. The truth of the matter, however, is that he pretty much likes what he knows, and what he knows is what he has heard smart scientists say. Were smart scientists to say that a form of yeast is intermediate between the great apes and human beings, Hitchens would, no doubt, conceive an increased respect for yeast. But that’s a journalist for you: all zeal and no content. No, no, not you, of course. You’re not like the others.

The problem with Berlinski is that he's a fuzzy-headed idiot on some things but on others he hits a little too close to the mark for my comfort level. He's the Christopher Hitchens of the Intellligent Design movement.

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[Photo Credit: Turkey's First ID Conference, March 2007]

Chalk Up One for the Intelligent Design Creationists

 
Jason Rosenhouse has been following an exchange between Micheal Behe and Theistic Evolutionist Creationist Ken Miller [In Which I Agree With Michael Behe Over Ken Miller]. Miller is upset because Behe's intelligent designer made malaria.

Miller doesn't think this fits with his idea of a loving God so he criticizes Behe in a recent review published in a Catholic magazine. Behe responds and here's what Jason says,

Bingo! That's exactly right, and it nicely punctures the sophistry offered up by theistic evolutionists.

I agree with Jason. This is a fight between two Intelligent Design Creationists even though one of them (Ken Miller) pretends that he's not a creationist. What I like about this exchange is that Behe is honest and forthright about the implications of his belief in a designer. The Theistic Evolutionist Creationists on the other hand, aren't.

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Best Science Blog

 
There are ten candidates in the voting for Best Science Blog—part of the 2007weblogawards.

I'm familiar with two of them; Pharyngula and Bad Astronomy but not with the others. Can anyone help out? What's interesting in that list?

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Breaking News... Mathematicians Don't Believe in Evolution!

 

This jerk is David Berlinski a mathematician and a Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He's not a biologist and neither are his "skeptical" mathematician friends. I wonder what he would say if a bunch of evolutionary biologists expressed skepticism about vector calculus and scaler fields? They sound like pretty crazy ideas to me.

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Denyse O'Leary's Advice to Students

 
Denyse O'Leary is teaching a short course on intelligent design creationism [Denyse O'Leary's University Course on Intelligent Design]. Presumably, the students in her class don't need to be afraid of making fools of themselves but it's a different story when creationists sit in on a real science course.

Not to worry. She has an answer for those students [Not a Darwinbot? Got a story? Tell it to The EXPELLED!].

I usually tell students, keep QUIET. Act like a good little Darwinbot. Question nothing, no matter how ridiculous. Practice keeping a straight face. (Anyone who laughs will be disqualified.) Get great marks.

It's called lying for Jesus.

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Is Race a Biological Concept?

 
I suppose it was inevitable. The latest issue of New Scientist has the obligatory article denying that intelligence can be defined and denying that humans can be separated into races. This is required political correctness in light of Jim Watson's comments from two weeks ago.

The politically correct author in this case is Robert J. Sternberg, a psychologist at Tufts University [Race and intelligence: Not a case of black and white]. He writes ...

A further hugely complicating factor is what we mean by the word "race". Populations in different parts of the world have clearly adapted to their environments in different ways. A trait that is beneficial in one environment may work against people in another. Obesity is a problem today because it once was beneficial to eat as much as one could while one could. Stratification - classifying people into categories of higher and lower status in a society - already occurs on the basis of weight just as it has on the basis of intelligence test scores.

But there is nothing special about skin colour that serves as a basis for differentiating humans into so-called races. Skin colour correlates only weakly with genetic differentiations. Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Maryland, and Kidd have found that the genetic differences among black Africans are often greater than those between blacks and whites. The significance of those labels stems only from the fact that society has found it convenient to label races on the basis of skin colour.

Curiously, we do not apply the concept of "race" to colours of dogs or cats - or moths, for that matter. For some of these, colour can be important: being a black moth confers camouflage advantages in polluted environments and disadvantages in clean environments - and vice versa for white moths. Similarly, our ancestors in Africa were almost certainly dark-skinned because it provided better protection against the particular challenges of the environment, such as ultraviolet light. We could of course refer to moths as being of different "races". We do not, presumably because we are less interested in creating social classes for moths than for people.

The problems with our understanding of intelligence and race show that the criticism being levelled at Watson is based on science rather than political correctness. Intelligence is clearly a far more complicated issue than standard testing allows. And race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. It derives from people's desire to classify. Whether people with a genetic predisposition toward fatness will be classified as a separate race remains to be seen.

We all know what people mean when they talk about blacks and whites. Those are synonyms for Africans and Europeans. Unless Sternberg is being extremely pedantic, he's arguing that there are no such thing as distinct populations of Europeans and Africans that differ genetically. Races—or demes if you wish—don't exist according to him.

That's nonsense, of course, but it seems to be widespread nonsense. I'm beginning to wonder whether the discipline of psychology deserves to be called a science.

There's an interesting press release out today from Cold Spring Harbor Press [Scientists discover genetic variant associated with prostate cancer in African Americans]. It reports on a study of higher incidence of prostate cancer among African Americans compared to European Americans. The scientists identified a particular locus on chromosome 8 (8q24) that may contain a genetic variant that differs between the two groups.

Other studies show that the incidence of cystic fibrosis is higher among Europeans (whites) than among Africans (blacks).

How could there be a genetic difference between Africans and Europeans if there's no such thing as race? If these are just social constructs there shouldn't be any genetic differences that correlate with other features used to distinguish the two groups, right?

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