E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything involves both individual selection and group selection — but what jumped out at me (and Razib Khan) was this passage:

This is hardly the first scientific controversy surrounding Wilson. An even bigger fight erupted around him in the 1970s, as he laid out his ideas on sociobiology in three landmark books, The Insect Societies, Sociobiology, and On Human Nature. At issue throughout were his claims that our genes not only are responsible for our biological form, but help shape our instincts, including our social nature and many other individual traits.

These contentions drew fierce criticism from all across the social sciences, and from prominent specialists in evolution such as Wilson’s late Harvard colleague, Stephen Jay Gould, who helped lead the charge against him.

Wilson defined sociobiology for me as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in all organisms.” Gould savagely mocked both Wilson’s ideas and his supposed hubris in a 1986 essay titled “Cardboard Darwinism,” in The New York Review of Books, for seeking “to achieve the greatest reform in human thinking about human nature since Freud,” and Wilson still clearly bears a grudge.

“I believe Gould was a charlatan,” he told me. “I believe that he was… seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.” It is easy to imagine Wilson privately resenting Gould for another reason, as well — namely, for choosing Freud as a point of comparison rather than his own idol, Darwin, whom he calls “the greatest man in the world.”

“Darwin is the one who changed everything, our self-conception; greater than Copernicus,” Wilson told me. “This guy is irritatingly correct, time and time again, even when he has limited evidence.” In Darwin’s mold, the thrust of Wilson’s life work has been aimed at changing humankind’s self-conception. Indeed it can be difficult, from today’s vantage point, to see what much of the fuss of the 1970s was about, so thoroughly has the Wilsonian idea that our genes shape our nature penetrated the mainstream.

How Friends Ruin Memory

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Jonah Lehrer explains how friends ruin memory:

The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner.

This time, though, the subjects were given a “lifeline”: they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing group. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the lifeline was actually composed of false answers to the very questions that the subjects had previously answered correctly and confidently. Remarkably, this false feedback altered the responses of the participants, leading nearly 70 percent to conform to the group and give an incorrect answer. They had revised their stories in light of the social pressure.

The question, of course, is whether their memory of the film had actually undergone a change. (Previous studies have demonstrated that people will knowingly give a false answer just to conform to the group. We’re such wimps.) To find out, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab one last time to take the memory test, telling them that the answers they had previously been given were not those of their fellow film watchers, but randomly generated by a computer. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, but more than 40 percent remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted by the earlier session.

Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Bellator is not nearly as well known as the UFC, but they’re hoping that sharing the recent Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler will help change that:

As Bears Multiply, Human Clashes Rise

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Black bears may be smaller and less aggressive than their grizzly cousins, but as they’ve multiplied, human-bear clashes have risen:

Black bears, which can top 350 pounds, were hunted with vigor for centuries. But with their populations near collapse, states began imposing hunting limits or bans in the 1970s.

Recovery has been slow—bears reproduce just every two to three years—but pronounced. Today there are an estimated 3,000 black bears roaming Florida, up from just 300 in the mid-1970s, said David Telesco, who manages bear conservation in the state. Between 300 and 400 black bears live in Nevada, and biologists say the population is growing 16% a year.

“There are now bears in areas of the country where there haven’t been bears since the colonial days,” said Rick Winslow, a carnivore biologist with the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish.

Black bears preparing for winter eat 20,000 calories per day, so they’re always looking for food:

In New Jersey, the state Department of Environmental Protection tallied 2,400 bear incidents last year, up from 1,800 in 2009. The reports ranged from a bear strolling through a college campus to home invasion. “Literally, people would go out to get the groceries from their car, leave the screen door open, and come back to find a bear in their home,” said Larry Ragonese, a spokesman for the department.

In New Mexico, the Department of Game and Fish has killed more than 230 bears this year that were disturbing people, pets or property, up from 86 last year and 24 the year before.

In Nevada, where black bears have taken to raiding garbage bins around Lake Tahoe, the legislature authorized the state’s first-ever bear hunt this year, to the dismay of antihunting activists.

The antihunting activists don’t seem to realize that a bear population growing at 16% a year can’t just be left alone.

Armageddon 1958

Monday, November 21st, 2011

What would all-out nuclear war have looked like 50 years ago?, Richard Fernandez asks:

It would have been fought with thousands of missiles and jet bombers sortieing from hundreds of airbases controlled by teleprinters, conference calls and video-link. Data would have been assessed on giant white boards and summarized in face-to-face briefings. At least one vision of how it would have played out is depicted in the 1958 Strategic Air Command simulation of a central nuclear war with the Soviet Union…

The men who produced the simulation unwittingly left a testimonial to their greatest achievement, which, in retrospect, at least rivals the achievement of the Greatest Generation. It was the generation that successfully did not fight their war. We have not had a general war in nearly three generations. In the last reel, one of the fictional generals says, “we failed in our primary mission, but succeeded in our secondary mission, that of destroying the enemy.” In actuality, their achievement was far greater. By luck or skill, they led us through the valley of the shadow of death to the 21st century.

They did it in part by staring unblinkingly at the facts; by refusing to boggle at incredible quantities and incalculable dangers and refusing to hide them. The men of 50 years ago all knew that to keep war in bounds you had to keep death plainly in sight. You had to leave a giant memento mori, in the shape of a special colored phone, on the President’s and Premier’s desk. A reminder against the possibility they might forget and grow proud; when sweet words like R2P and kinetic military action, not terrible war, would creep into their speech. Deterrence succeeded in part because it never lost sight of what the professionals always knew: the root of war was in the heart of man. It was never in the weapons.

Life’s a Happy Song

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

Composer Bret McKenzie, of Flight of the Conchords, and Kermit the Frog, of the Muppets, sing Life’s a Happy Song:

Jason Segel and the Muppets Monologue

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

Jason Segel and the Muppets can’t believe they’re hosting Saturday Night Live:

Defining Political Correctness is Tantamount to Destroying It

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

John C. Wright recommends Bruce Charlton’s Thought Prison, about modern Political Correctness, or Progressivism, but believes that defining PC is tantamount to destroying it:

That is precisely why PC folk take such steps to obscure their meaning, goals, and means. That is why they will not be ‘labeled’ and why they dismiss those of us who label them as thinking in a way that is ‘too black and white’ i.e. too simplistic. Their thinking is to say ‘black is white’ i.e. inversion, paradox, falsehood.

When you say nonsense clearly, it has no persuasive force: you raise a smile rather than raise an army. But when you utter nonsense obscurely, ah, then you are like unto a spirit of the kingdom of darkness, and no one can see you, no one grapple you, no one smite you with his sword. The mission of PC is sabotage, not melee: and saboteurs do not like banners and uniforms to identify them no more than PC likes definitions, labels, reason.

Like Rumpelstiltskin, you need but call them by their right name to watch them rip themselves in half in fury.

The modernists of PC gained their predominance by persuading people not that PC was true (for they do not believe it true) but that it is nice, and that we, to be nice, must also pretend to be nice. Any opposition of the undefined niceness is defined as not nice.

Their gains were rapid, but it took them a century or more to gain them, and, by the nature of PC, the gains cannot be permanent. Let their losses begin today, and now, even if it takes ten centuries, or longer. I need but convince one mind to turn away from political correctness toward factual correctness, and their armies are forever one man shy. He need but convince two, and so forth. They did not win all at one dramatic stroke, nor shall we.

(Hat tip to Kalim Kassam.)

Equality and Diversity are both Good Things

Saturday, November 19th, 2011

There’s one major, unavoidable aspect of inequality that is almost entirely suppressed from debate, Ed West notes:

Last month in the New York Times Columbia Professor Alexander Stille touched on this strange paradox. He wrote:

It’s a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.

At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.

This is nothing new. A few years ago David Goodhart wrote a hugely influential article in Prospect pointing out that diversity and equality are in conflict, and David Willetts coined the phrase the “progressive dilemma” to define the same problem. However way, way before that, back in 2000, American journalist Steve Sailer noticed the link. He wrote:

The poorest poor in the country are in New Mexico, where the average income of the bottom fifth is only $8,700. The quite expensive state of Arizona, spiritual home of the $150 golf greens fee, has the eighth poorest poor people in America at $10,800. (But at least they make more than the bottom rung in immensely costly New York). In contrast, the wealthiest bottom fifth is in Colorado where they average $18,500 per year. Probably even more impressive, however, is the $18,200 average in Utah, since its cost of living is quite low.

This obvious correlation between immigration and inequality is little remarked upon in the press, for various reasons. One big one is that polite society has decreed that since Equality and Diversity are both Good Things, they must therefore be synonyms rather than what they are: antonyms.

Sailer is a popular blogger, rather like an eccentric but brilliant professor possessed of a vast breadth of knowledge, and would probably be a big thing in American commentary, producing those American polemics With Those Absurdly Long Subtitles that Explain the Entire Subject of the Book, but his views on the biology of race put him beyond the pale for mainstream conservative publications.

(Hat tip to Steve Sailer himself.)

Art Deco and Bauhaus Superhero Illustrations

Friday, November 18th, 2011

Grégoire Guillemin has produced a number of Art Deco and Bauhaus superhero illustrations

A Tired Democracy

Friday, November 18th, 2011

Something led me to G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man — more specifically, to Part 1, Chapter 3, The Antiquity of Civlisation — and this passage leapt out at me:

If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East. But I cannot see why the Sultan should have appeared any earlier in history than many other human figures. On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously depends upon the superiority of his armor; and armament of that sort comes with more complex civilization. One man may kill twenty with a machine gun; it is obviously less likely that he could do it with a piece of flint. As for the current cant about the strongest man ruling by force and fear, it is simply a nursery fairytale about a giant with a hundred hands. Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in any society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly they might admire, in a romantic and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest; but that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral and even mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one. As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler of an old humanity . It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a pure democracy. To this day the comparatively simple agricultural communities are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilization. Anyone who likes may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of civilization.

Then a quick search revealed that Foseti had called out that exact passage a few months ago.

Kine

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Kine” is an archaic plural for cow, but unlike other plurals formed by adding -n rather than -schildren, brethren, oxen — it has no letters in common with its singular form.

Then again, cattle isn’t too similar, either:

Cattle did not originate as the term for bovine animals. It was borrowed from Old French catel, itself from Latin caput, head, and originally meant movable personal property, especially livestock of any kind, as opposed to real property (the land, which also included wild or small free-roaming animals such as chickens — they were sold as part of the land).

The word is closely related to “chattel” (a unit of personal property) and “capital” in the economic sense. The term replaced earlier Old English feoh “cattle, property” (cf. German: Vieh, Gothic: faihu).

The word cow came via Anglo-Saxon c? (plural c?), from Common Indo-European g??us (genitive g?owes) = “a bovine animal”, compare Persian Gâv, Sanskrit go, Welsh buwch.[citation needed] The genitive plural of “c?” is “c?na”, which gave the now archaic English plural, and Scots plural, of “kine”.

In older English sources such as the King James Version of the Bible, “cattle” refers to livestock, as opposed to “deer” which refers to wildlife. “Wild cattle” may refer to feral cattle or to undomesticated species of the genus Bos. Today, when used without any other qualifier, the modern meaning of “cattle” is usually restricted to domesticated bovines.

It just gets weirder when we realize there is no singular form of cattle:

Cattle can only be used in the plural and not in the singular: it is a plurale tantum. Thus one may refer to “three cattle” or “some cattle”, but not “one cattle”. There is no universally used singular form in modern English of “cattle”, other than the sex- and age-specific terms such as cow, bull, steer and heifer. Historically, “ox” was a non-gender-specific term for adult cattle, but generally this is now used only for draft cattle, especially adult castrated males.

“Cow” is in general use as a singular for the collective “cattle”, despite the objections by those who insist it to be a female-specific term. Although the phrase “that cow is a bull” is absurd from a lexicographic standpoint, the word “cow” is easy to use when a singular is needed and the sex is unknown or irrelevant — when “there is a cow in the road”, for example. Further, any herd of fully mature cattle in or near a pasture is statistically likely to consist mostly of cows, so the term is probably accurate even in the restrictive sense.

To Miss with Love

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

A year and a half ago, I was enjoying Miss Snuffleupagus‘s blog, To Miss with Love, about her experiences teaching in London’s inner-city schools, but I lost track of it, and now the blog is gone.

A quick search for “To Miss with Love” revealed that it’s now a book, and its author is one Katharine Birbalsingh — who, judging by her Conservative Conference Speech, doesn’t look nearly as West Indian as one might have imagined:

Woman Thwarts Burglary through Her CCTV

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

If you’ve been thinking about getting a web-enabled video security camera, this footage of burglars robbing a woman’s house as she speaks to the 911 dispatcher from her work could push you to make the purchase:



(Hat tip to Boing Boing, where the commenters are upset that the woman says, “There’s a black man in my house and he’s robbing it.”)

A Firsthand Look at Firefights in Marja

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Forget the fables about Afghan marksmen, C.J. Chivers said, after spending a month and a half in Helmand Province with the Marines — but when the Afghans do field a decent marksman, it almost paralyzes the American troops, as this firsthand look at a firefight in Marja (last year) demonstrates:



You can see how much of the “fight” consists of trying to spot the enemy, and you can hear how unusual accurate fire is by how often the troops use that term — and the similar effective fire.

When a Marine does get hit, it emphasizes how important accurate fire really is. A shot through the meat of the shoulder, even with a big .303 round from a Lee-Enfield, doesn’t keep the young Marine from getting “back on his gun” after a few minutes of care from a corpsman. A shot through the bone would have been a different story entirely, and one through the head or chest would have been fatal.