Thanks to Greg Laden most readers on his blog are now much more knowledgeable about Canada than most Canadians.
You are indeed correct that evolutionary psychology has at times succumbed to the allure of just-so storytelling. That said, it is unfair (and frankly dishonest of you) to place all evolutionary behavioral scientists under the negative umbrella that you repeatedly do. Evolutionary psychologists produce great, profound, and valuable works, and at times can produce weaker works with tenuous conclusions. This holds true of biochemists as well. Physicists disagree as to whether String Theory is valid or not. Should we equally view physicists as providers of shoddy and controversial work?I was intrigued by the claim that evolutionary psychologists have produced "great, profound, and valuable works" and I asked for examples. He supplied them but around that time I got distracted by real life and didn't follow up on our email exchanges.
- Women alter their preferences for the facial features of men as a function of where they are in their menstrual cycles. When maximally fertile, they prefer men possessing markers of high testosterone.
- Babies display an immediate instinctual preference for symmetric faces (at an age that precedes the capacity for socialization).
- Children who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia display a reversal in their toy preferences. Furthermore, using inter-species comparisons, vervet monkeys display the same sex-specific patterns of play/toy preferences as human infants. This suggests that contrary to the argument made by social constructivists, play has an evolved biological basis.
- Individuals who score high on an empathy scale are more likely to succumb to the contagion effects of yawning. This is indicative that this particular contagion might be linked to mimicry and/or Theory of Mind.
- How provocatively a woman dresses is highly correlated to her menstrual cycle (a form of sexual signaling found across countless Mammalian species).
- Culinary traditions are adaptations to local niches. For example, the extent to which a culture utilizes meat versus vegetables, spices, or salt is a cultural adaptation (this is what behavioral ecologists study).
- Maternal grandmothers and paternal grandfathers invest the most and the least respectively in their grandchildren. Whereas all four grandparents have a genetic relatedness coefficient of 0.25 with their grandchildren, they do not all carry the same level of "parental uncertainty." In the case of maternal grandmothers, there is no uncertainty whereas in the case of the paternal grandfather, there are two sources of uncertainty. This last fact drives the differential pattern of investment in the grandchildren.
- Good male dancers are symmetric (paper published in Nature). One would expect that some behavioral traits might correlate with phenotypic quality as honest signals of an individual's desirability on the mating market.
- Self-preference for perfumes is linked to one's immunogenetic profile (Major Histocompatibility Complex).
- When a baby is born, most family members (especially those of the mother) are likely to state that the baby looks like the father. This phenomenon is found in countless cultures despite the fact that it is objectively impossible to make such a claim of resemblance. The reason for this universally found cultural tradition lies in the need to assuage the fears of paternity uncertainty.
- Environmental stressors (e.g., father absence) and the onset of menarche (first menses) have been shown to be highly linked. In numerous species, the likelihood of a female becoming reproductively viable is affected by environmental contingencies.
- Women are less receptive to mandatory hospital DNA paternity testing (for obvious reasons). In other words, their willingness to adopt a new product/service is fully driven by an evolutionary-based calculus.
- Women can smell the most symmetric men. In other words, women have the capacity to identify men who possess the best phenotypic quality simply via their nose. This is what I have referred to as sensorial convergence.
- Using fMRI, the exposure to ecologically-relevant stimuli (e.g., beautiful faces) yields distinct neural activation patterns in men and women.
- In choosing a mate, humans tend to prefer the smell of others that are maximally dissimilar to them along the MHC. This ensures that offspring possess a greater "defensive coverage" in terms of their immunological system.
According the a report from Russia, the current swine flue pandemic is caused by genetically modified potatoes that are sold as French Fries in many Western industrialized nations [Russian Scientists Warn Of Genetically Modified Fast Food Link To Pandemic Flu]. Scientists from Russia’s Ministry of Health are warning in a secret report to Prime Minister Putin that they have discovered a ‘critical link’ between the H1N1 influenza (Swine Flu) virus and genetically modified amylopectin potatoes that are consumed in massive quantities nearly exclusively by Westerners and sold in fast food restaurants as French Fries.This is very troubling. I'd like to be an accommodationist and pretend that the Russian
According to these reports, the protease enzyme genetically modified in the potatoes being sold through Western fast food restaurants as French Fries to protect against Potato virus X causes an “explosive” replication of the H1N1 influenza virus by increasing the acidic conditions of the endosome and causing the hemagglutinin protein to rapidly fuse the viral envelope with the vacuole's membrane, then causing the M2 ion channel to allow protons to move through the viral envelope and acidify the core of the virus, which causes the core to dissemble and release the H1N1’s RNA and core proteins into the hosts cells.
Evidence confirming these dire findings by top Russian scientists is also supported by the World Health Organization who in their reporting on the current Influenza Pandemic, clearly shows that the H1N1 virus is nearly totally confined to those Western Nations allowing their citizens to consume these genetically modified potatoes, and which include: The United States with over 17,000 cases being reported with 45 deaths; Canada with 2,978 cases; the United Kingdom with 1,226 cases; and Australia with 1,823 cases.
The Glory for Christ Football League in Georgia grew out of a desire to provide an option for young men who are home-schooled but cannot play in local football leagues.
Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.This is the problem. Whenever you encounter a religious person who claims that there's no conflict between their religious beliefs and science, you have every right to engage in a discussion about the specific beliefs that they hold.
While such a leap may not be unimpeachable it is certainly rational, as Mr. McGinn pointed out at the World Science Festival. Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world's organized religions. As Sam Harris recently wrote in a letter responding to the Nature editorial that called him an "atheist absolutist," a "reconciliation between science and Christianity would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions."
When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.
Some questions are really very simple in spite of the fact that people want to make them complicated. When I ask you, "Do you believe in God?" it really doesn't require a lot of thought for most people. True, there might be a few people who want more clarification about the meaning of God but those people are the exceptions. Usually you can get a response by asking, "Are you a theist?"So, to summarise, when an atheist says to me I am an atheist because I lack a view, I am minded to reply, “I am also an asportist” for failing to have a team in any sport that I support. It makes about as much sense.I'm sorry, John. I'll respect your (strange) opinion and not call you an atheist, but you really are an asportist!
Blogs and Twitter are opening up meetings to those not actually there. Does that mean too much access to science in the raw, asks Geoff Brumfiel.Next month I'm going to a meeting on "The Tree of Life." I intend to let you all know what goes on at that meeting but it shouldn't be a problem since the participants know what I'm doing and I won't be the only blogger.
I admire Stephen Jay Gould for many reasons but his honesty ranks right up there near the top of the list.... we scientists are no different from anyone else. We are passionate human beings, enmeshed in a web of personal and social circumstances. Our field does recognize canons of procedure designed to give nature the long shot of asserting herself in the face of such biases, but unless scientists understand their hopes and engage in vigorous self-scrutiny, they will not be able to sort out unacknowledged preference from nature's weak and imperfect message.The problem in scientific discourse is not the background of the scientist but the strength and logic of the scientific arguments. It may be useful to see *why* certain scientists adopt certain positions at a particular point in time but that explains the history of an idea and not its correctness.
Leftist scientists are more likely to combat biological determinism just as rightests tend to favor this quintessential justification of the statu quo as intractable biology; the correlations are not accidental. But let us not be so disrespectful of thought that we dismiss the logic of arguments as nothing but an inevitable reflection of biases—a confusion of context of discovery whith context of justification.Gould often laid his cards on the table when he confessed to his background. Whether it was baseball, a love of history, or a preference for New York, these were part of his personality and sometimes they crept into his science.
Phil Bell, CEO of Creation Ministries UK, acknoweged that his organisation established a "front company" called Fathom Media, because they were concerned that experts such as Peter Bowler would not agree to take part in the film if they realised it was an "overtly Creationist" production. "At the end of the day," he said, "[when] people see 'Creationist', instantly the shutters go up and that would have shut us off from talking to the sort of experts, such as Professor Bowler, that we wanted to get to."
GREY hair may be unwelcome, but the processes that produce it are now better understood and could be protecting us from cancer.First off, I want to make it clear that many of us with grey hair do not find it "unwelcome" in spite of societal pressures to make us feel embarrassed.
Somatic stem cell depletion due to the accumulation of DNA damage has been implicated in the appearance of aging-related phenotypes. Hair graying, a typical sign of aging in mammals, is caused by the incomplete maintenance of melanocyte stem cells (MSCs) with age. Here, we report that irreparable DNA damage, as caused by ionizing radiation, abrogates renewal of MSCs in mice. Surprisingly, the DNA-damage response triggers MSC differentiation into mature melanocytes in the niche, rather than inducing their apoptosis or senescence. The resulting MSC depletion leads to irreversible hair graying. Furthermore, deficiency of Ataxia-telangiectasia mutated (ATM), a central transducer kinase of the DNA-damage response, sensitizes MSCs to ectopic differentiation, demonstrating that the kinase protects MSCs from their premature differentiation by functioning as a “stemness checkpoint” to maintain the stem cell quality and quantity.The idea is that DNA damage causes stem cells to differentiate into melanocytes that eventually die. Since there are fewer stem cells there will be fewer melanocytes produced over time and hair becomes grey. The fact that damaged stem cells undergo terminal differentiation instead of remaining as stem cells means that they are probably less likely to serve as the progenitors of a cancerous cell line.
The number of new species discovered is growing every year, although we often hear more about threatened extinctions. In many cases this is because of new observations leading to the identification of new species. For the most part, these are not entirely new organisms—they are species that are closely related to existing species. 
Denyse O'Leary can hardly contain herself 'cause Stephen Meyer's book is about to go on sale.The foundations of scientific materialism are in the process of crumbling. In Signature in the Cell, philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer shows how the digital code in DNA points powerfully to a designing intelligence behind the origin of life. The book will be published on June 23 by HarperOne.
Unlike previous arguments for intelligent design, Signature in the Cell presents a radical and comprehensive new case, revealing the evidence not merely of individual features of biological complexity but rather of a fundamental constituent of the universe: information. That evidence has been mounting exponentially in recent years, known to scientists in specialized fields but largely hidden from public view. A Cambridge University-trained theorist and researcher, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, Dr. Meyer is the first to bring the relevant data together into a powerful demonstration of the intelligence that stands outside nature and directs the path life has taken.
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As a philosopher and a scientist himself, having worked in the field of geophysics for Atlantic Richfield, Meyer is able to step back from the fray of competing views about Darwinian theory and offer a searching, compelling investigation of life’s beginning.
Actually, we teach evolution because it’s a wonderful subject, explains a lot about the world, and happens to be true. And yes, it’s likely that teaching evolution probably promotes a critical examination of religious beliefs that may lead to rejecting faith. But teaching geology, physics, or astronomy does that, too.This seems to contradict his main argument since it implies that teaching science does, indeed, lead to rejecting religious beliefs. But, wait a minute, he goes on to say that ..
In fact, education in general leads to the rejection of faith. (Statistics show that the more education one has, the less likely one is to be religious.) Should we then worry about teaching physics, astronomy, or indeed, allowing people access to higher education, because those “promote” atheism?No, we shouldn't "worry" about that but it would be foolish to deny it. The essence of the scientific way of knowing is evidence, rationalism, and also one-mindedness and skepticism. We need to teach that to our children. To deny that this is inimical to faith-based ways of knowing is to deny the obvious.
Should we constantly be looking over our shoulders because the courts may catch onto this?Maybe you should, if you live in America. The evolutionist side in America has put a high value on winning court cases based on rather arcane legal arguments—who, besides lawyers, cares about the Lemon test? If the bad guys decide to fight back in the courts by challenging the teaching of proper science then watch out. I've heard there are a lot of lawyers in America.
Teach only the science and the "problem" evaporates. Any tendency to reject faith because of the teaching of the science is what church and state scholar Kent Greenawalt has called "spillover effects," which do not render the teaching unconstitutional because they are not a "primary effect" of it.If I understand him correctly, the teaching of Intelligent Design Creationism is unconstitutional because its "primary effect" is to promote religion. The teaching of evidence based rationalism (i.e. scientific reasoning) has as its primary purpose the destruction of superstitious beliefs but the fact that this includes religion is just a "spillover effect."
