Archives May 2007

Evolution of Morality

The Post has an interesting article about the origin of morality (HT ). It talks about research showing that various moral impulses are hardwired into our brains by evolution.

This dovetails nicely with another bit of research I stumbled upon recently (but can’t find now) that showed that, when posed with a moral problem, people from all over the world pretty much agree on what the right answer is, though they offer different explanations.

What this suggests is that we dislike stealing because we’re wired that way, and any explanation, be it “It goes against the 8th Commandment” or something involving Rousseau’s social contract, is post-hoc justification of a chosen conclusion.

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Islamic Bicycles

This is for real, as far as I can tell:

Iran plans to make special bicycles designed for women that will be compatible with Islamic regulations and not expose their body movements while riding.

The new bicycle would have a cabin to cover half of a rider’s body, the newspaper Iran quoted project manager Elaheh Sofali as saying.

Jesus and Mo has the perfect T-shirt for this:
Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust

Seriously, what’s these people’s hangup about sex? The cynic in me thinks that if you take a bunch of normal young males and try to get them to suppress the sexual urges bequeathed them by half a billion years’ worth of evolution, of course they’re going to become neurotic and pliant.

These people really need to have a glass of wine, get laid, and just chill out.

Why Name A Newspaper After an Insect?

One question that’s been bugging me (sorry for the pun) is why any newspaper would call itself the “Town Name Bee”. Thankfully, the Sacramento Bee has an explanation (summary: the bee represents industry, as in “busy as a bee”).

Naturally, if I point out that there’s a town in Arkansas called De Queen, you won’t be surprised to learn that its newspaper is De Queen Bee.

Well, That Didn’t Take Long…

Falwell In Hell

Why Everything Good Is Bad for You

Imagine an animal that requires some substance, but that substance is scarce. Say, a mountain goat that needs salt, but lives in mountains where there’s hardly any around, unlike the seashore. In such an environment, it’ll need all the salt it can get, and natural selection will favor those goats that find salt tasty, since they’ll seek it out.

Obviously, it’s possible to have too much salt in one’s body, so ideally there ought to be a biological function that switches off this craving for salt. But in practice, if salt is that scarce, there’s no such thing as too much salt, so the mechanism that switches off salt’s tastiness can be horribly miscalibrated and still not be selected against.

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This Article Is About Self-Reference and Complexity (but This Title Isn’t)

I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop, and there’s something that doesn’t sit well with me.

In Chapter 4, he discusses his fascination with self-reference and feedback loops of all kinds. He talks about the operation of a toilet, in which water enters the tank, which raises the floater, which in turn cuts off the intake valve. The toilet can be said to “want” to be full. He then asks,

Why does this move to a goal-oriented — that is, teleological — shorthand seem appealing to us for a system endowed with feedback, but not so appealing for a less structured system?

(italics in the original.)

He seems to be saying that feedback ⇔ teleology (or intentionality, which is what I think Dennett and other philosophers might call it). In this, I think he’s wrong, though in an interesting way. Read More

Latte Art

Maybe I just don’t hang out at the right coffee houses, but I don’t think I’ve seen this before:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5N6f7Ry1Xo]

Coffee Geek has a guide on how to do this sort of stuff.

Has Hovind Actually Learned Something?

Kent Hovind says on his weblog:

At lunch last week, one of the inmates said, “If I could, I would bomb the Christian Coalition. They are the reason we are here.” I was shocked by his statement! I love the Christian Coalition, but I understand the man’s point. For years, Christians have pushed judges and legislators to be “tough on crime.” Most are thinking about violent crimes when pushing for this type legislation. However, only about three percent of those incarcerated in the United States are incarcerated for violent crimes. The unreasonable sentences people are given have come from judges who have never spent even one day locked up and who brag that they will give out sentences totaling “a million years” during their time on the bench.

Having been here for nearly six months, I will forever be an advocate of closing most jails and prisons. What this type of punishment does to families and society is terrible.

(emphasis added.)

Well, duh. There’s a saying that “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”. Perhaps we can add another saying, that a liberal is a conservative who’s been screwed by the system.

Glad he’s finally figured out what some people have been saying for years. That maybe throwing people in prison willy-nilly isn’t as good as actually doing something about the root problem, that the cost of incarceration (both monetary and its effects on others) may exceed its beneficial effects, and generally that while “getting tough on crime” may be a good slogan, it’s not necessarily the best approach in the real world. (In fact, it may make things worse: apparently the number of murders shot up when Florida passed a law making armed robbery a capital crime: people holding up 7-Elevens would kill the clerk so he couldn’t be a witness; they figured since they were committing a capital crime anyway, then adding murder to that wasn’t going to make things any worse for them).

Minimum-sentencing laws bother me because they take away the judge’s ability to impose a light or suspended sentence if he or she deems it appropriate, even though it’s the judge’s job to learn the facts of the case and determine how justice can best be served. It’s like passing a law that anyone with attention-deficit disorder must take Ritalin: it may be a good idea in most cases, but not all. And why should the legislature, rather than one’s doctor, make that decision?

Anway, just to show that he’s still the same old Kent Hovind, he adds this bit of paranoid nut-jobbery:

I believe that we as Christians are unwittingly funding and encouraging the very prisons that will house the Christians as the New World Order approaches!

In other news, Hovind is apparently now in solitary.

If You Could Never Leave the Milky Way, Would You Call it Imprisonment?

Frank Pastore has a rather moronic column over at Clownhall. If you’ve got your anti-stupid goggles on, you can read the whole thing, but one paragraph isn’t addressed in the comments. Here, he is ostensibly reading from the atheist playbook:

Avoid the pesky problem of freewill. If atheism is true, if all that exists is mere matter and energy, then I don’t have a brain, I am my brain. But if the brain is exhaustively physical, then it is just as incapable of acting freely as a computer or any other machine. Which is why the idea of Artificial Intelligence makes for such fun science fiction – the more peo-ple believe that a computer can become a person, the less likely they will have need to believe they were created in God’s image. Thus, more AI, less theism – that’s the game plan. Same with the search for ET. Find life elsewhere so we can dismiss Genesis.

(emphasis added)

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Drawing the Wrong Conclusion from Giant Bacteria

DaveScot has an article over at Casa Dembski about Epulopiscium fishelsoni. Judging by the article that he links to (from the Journal of Bacteriology, 1998), this bacterium looks like a pretty interesting beastie: it changes size by up to 20 times. That’s individual cells, not variation in a population: a single E. fishelsoni can grow to become 10-20 times larger than it was some hours ago. Not only that, but at its largest, it’s over half a millimeter long, making it visible to the naked eye.

But what interests DaveScot is the size of its genome: about 1 trillion base pairs, more than 300 times as much as in humans, which he evidently takes to be evidence for intelligent design. Unfortunately, to do so he must ignore the conclusions of the very paper he cites.

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